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A SHORT HISTORY OF 



MODERN ENGLISH 
LITERATURE 






BY 

EDMUND GOSSE 

HON. M. A. OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 




NEW YORK 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1897 



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Copyright, iSg/, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



PREFACE 



The principal aim which I have had before me, in 
writing this volume, has been to show the movement 
of English literature. I have desired above all else 
to give the reader, whether familiar with the books 
mentioned or not, a feeling of the evolution of English 
literature in the primary sense of the term, the dis- 
entanglement of the skein, the slow and regular un- 
winding, down succeeding generations, of the threads 
of literary expression. To do this without relation to 
particular authors, and even particular works, seems to 
me impossible ; to attempt it would be to essay a vague 
disquisition on " style " in the abstract, a barren thing at 
best. To retain the character of an historical survey, with 
the introduction of the obvious names, has seemed to me 
essential ; but I have endeavoured to keep expression, 
form, technique, always before me as the central interest, 
rather than biography, or sociology, or mere unrelated 
criticism. In this way only, by the elimination of half 
the fascinating qualities which make literature valuable 
to us, could it be possible in so few pages to give any- 
thing but a gabble of facts. And the difficulties of omis- 
sion have been by far the greatest that have assailed me. 
If any one accuses me of injustice to an author, I must 
acknowledge with despair that I have been *' unjust " to 
every one, if justice be an exhaustive statement of his 
claims to consideration. No critical reader can be more 
indignant at my summary treatment of a favourite of his 



J 



vi PREFACE 

own than I have been at having to glide so swiftly over 
mine. But the procession of the entire theme was the 
one thing that seemed essential ; whether I have in any 
measure been able to present it, my readers must judge. 

The great pressure upon space has been relieved by 
dividing the history of English literature into two por- 
tions. If this series continues to receive the support of 
the public, it is hoped that a volume on the archaic 
section may bring the story down from the earliest 
times to Robert of Brunne and Laurence Minot. In 
my first three chapters I have further lightened my 
labour by leaving out of consideration what was written 
in this country in Latin or French, for, although this 
may be material in dealing with thought in England, it 
can have but a small connection with the history of 
expression in the English language. I make no apology 
for the prominence given throughout to the art of poetry, 
for it is in verse that style can most definitely and to 
greatest advantage be studied, especially in a literature 
like ours, where prose has mainly been written without 
any other aim than the naive transference of ideas or 
statement of facts, like the prose of M. Jourdain, while 
our national poetry, which is one of our main national 
glories, has been a consecutive chain of consciously 
elaborated masterpieces. 

I have to acknowledge, with warm thanks, the kind- 
ness of that distinguished mediaeval scholar. Prof. W. S. 
McCormick, of the University of St. Andrews, w^ho has 
been so obliging as to read the proofs of my early 
chapters. For other and more general acknowledg- 
ments I must refer to my bibliographical appendix. 

July, 1897. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

i. the age of chaucer (135o-i4oo) ..... i 

ii. the close of the middle ages (14oo-i560) ... 33 

iii. the age of elizabeth (1560-i620) 73 

iv. the decline (162o-1660) 1 29 

v. the age of dryden (1660-i700) ..... 161 
vi. the age of anne (170o-i740) . . . . . .197 

vii. the age of johnson {174o-i780) 232 

viii. the age of wordsworth {1780-1815)^ .... 267 

ix. the age of byron (1815-1840) 303 

x. the early victorian age (184o-1870) .... 334 

xi. the age of tennyson 360 

Epilogue 386 

Biographical List ........ 393 

Bibliographical Note 403 

Index , , . . , 409 

vii 



A SHORT HISTORY OF 

MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

I 

THE AGE OF CHAUCER 

1350-1400 

It is now a recognised fact that the continuity of English 
literature is unbroken from Beowulf ^iiid Caedmon down to 
the present day. But although this is not to be denied, 
it is convenient for practical purposes that we should 
begin the study of modern English poetry and prose at 
the point where the language in which these are written 
becomes reasonably and easily intelligible to us. The 
old classic writers looked upon Chaucer as " the father 
of English literature '* ; we look upon him as a figure 
midway between the fathers and us, their latest sons, and 
we are aware that for six or seven centuries before the 
composition of the Vision of Piers Plowman and the 
Canterbury Tales, Englishmen were writing what was 
stimulating, and national, and worthy of our closest 
attention. There came a great change in the fourteenth 
century, but we have been rash in supposing that a com- 
pletely new thing began at the close of the Middle Ages. 
The traditions of early English survived, and were merely 



2 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

modified. In Langland we shall presently meet with an 
author untouched by modern forms and ideas, who wrote 
in the manner and in the spirit of long generations of less- 
gifted precursors. The more closely literary history is 
studied, the less inclined shall we be to insist on a sudden 
and arbitrary line of demarcation between the old epoch 
and the new. 

Yet, it being convenient to distinguish, for practical 
purposes, between the Old and the Middle and New 
English, we do discover in 1350 a date with which we 
may make shift to begin the study of modern English 
literature. About that time a modification in English 
manners was introduced, which was of the highest im- 
portance to writers and readers. After the first great 
plague (1349) the residue gathered themselves together 
into what was more like a nation than anything which 
had existed in this country before, and this concentrated 
people reasserted for itself, what it had partly lost for a 
while, a national and native language. We may well 
begin the study of modern literature from the approxi- 
mate date of the recognition of English as the language 
of England. Very rapidly after that the general use of 
French disappeared, while the native dialects were drawn 
together and moulded into one ; our present grammar, 
and even our present vocabulary, being largely a creation 
of the reign of Edward III. English became a highly 
vitalised condensation of elements hitherto deemed irre- 
concilable, elements which were partly Teutonic, partly 
Latin. 

With the exclusion of foreign forms of speech, in 
future to be accepted only if molten into a firm and 
consistent English, our intellectual life assumes a whole- 
some insularity. When England was a political term, 



THE ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY 3 

including Anjou and Aquitaine, the forces of its intelli- 
gence were scattered. It retires behind the barrier of 
its narrow seas, and has no sooner divided itself from 
the language and interests of Europe than it recreates a 
literature of its own. The fusion of the native language 
does not become complete until the end of the century, 
but it had been working for fifty years previously. In 
1362 French ceases to be the legal tongue of the realm, 
and in 1363 the first English oration is made in Parlia- 
ment by a minister who will address members no longer 
in what is really a foreign tongue. All this movement is 
made in resistance to Court habits and Court prejudices ; 
it is a strictly popular movement, forcing upon the atten- 
tion of the upper classes the will of the millions who 
are ruled. The beginning of modern English literature, 
therefore, is essentially democratic without being revo- 
lutionary. It is a result of a break-down of the feudal 
principle of isolation, and the consequence of a fusion 
between the nobles and the professional and commer- 
cial part of the population. 

As we break into the literature of England at 1350, we 
find ourselves in the midst of a considerable metrical 
activity, w^hich does not promise at first to arrest our 
attention with anything very valuable or very salient. 
The favourite secular reading of the age seems to have 
been alliterative adaptations, mainly from the French, of 
the old romances of chivalry. Perhaps the most read- 
able, and certainly a very typical example of these imita- 
tions has come down to us in William of Paler me , the date 
of the composition of which is probably about 1355. 
The activity of the versifiers who carried on this facile 
manufacture of romances was exercised in two direc- 
tions : on the one hand they endeavoured to revive the 



4 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

old native measures, and on the other they strove to 
create a prosody analogous to that already accepted by 
the Latin nations. Out of the former proceeded Lang- 
land, and out of the latter Chaucer. The moment had 
come for a sharp and final contest between accentuated 
alliteration and rhyme. It was decided in favour of 
rhyme by the successes of Chaucer, but in the early part 
of the transitional period alliteration seemed to be in the 
ascendant. Many of the metrical romances mingled the 
two forms, usually in a fashion that was exceedingly in- 
effective and ungraceful. 

The chivalrous and monastic romances of this purely 
mediaeval period were, so far as we can now perceive, 
of little literary value. They were commonly mere imi- 
tations of translations ; they owed their plots and even 
their sentiments to French precursors, and if they are 
now to be studied, it is solely on account of their inter- 
est for the philologist. It is believed that all through the 
second half of the fourteenth century these paraphrases 
were excessively numerous, especially in the West-Mid- 
land dialect, and their literary insignificance was extreme. 
They dealt with corrupt and fragmentary legends of 
the Arthurian cycle, or with allegories which owed their 
form and substance alike to that Roman de la Rose, which 
had so profoundly impressed itself upon the sesthetic 
sense of Europe. Every poet felt constrained to retire 
into a bower or a bed, and there be subjected to a vision 
which he repeated in verse when he awakened. Not 
Chaucer, not even Langland, disdained to employ this 
facile convention. 

Among these monotonous romancists, most of them 
entirely anonymous, there emerges dimly the figure of 
one who was evidently a poet in the true sense, though 



PEARL 5 

not of a force sufficiently commanding to turn the tide 
of poetry in a new direction. This is the mysterious 
West-Midland writer, who, for want of a name, we have 
to call the author of Sir Gawain and the Green KnigJit. 
His works have come down to us in a solitary manu- 
script, and no contemporary notice of him has been 
discovered. There is, indeed, no external evidence to 
prove that the poet of Sir Gawain wrote the Pearl, 
Cleanness, and Patience, which accompany it, but the 
internal evidence is very strong. Not merely are these 
four poems highly similar in vocabulary and style, but 
they excel by a like altitude all other romances of 
their kind and age which are known to exist. There 
is repeated, moreover, in each of them a unique mood 
of austere spirituality, combined with a rare sense of 
visual beauty in a manner in itself enough to stamp the 
four poems as the work of one man. Until, then, fur- 
ther discoveries are made, we may be content to accept 
the author of Sir Gawain and the Green K^iight as the 
first poet of modern England, and as a precursor, in 
measure, both of Langland and Chaucer. Mr. Gollancz, 
who has edited and paraphrased the Pearl, surprised at 
the excellence and complete obscurity of this poet, has 
hazarded the conjecture that he may be that Ralph 
Strode (the '' philosophical Strode " of Chaucer's Troihis 
and Cressida) whose writings were so universally admired 
in the fourteenth century and seem to be now completely 
lost. This is a suggestion of which no more can be said 
than that it seems almost too good to be true. 

There were many romances written on the story of 
Gawain during the later half of the fourteenth century. 
Our author took many of his details from the Perceval 
of Chretien de Troyes, and extended his poem to more 



6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

than 2500 lines. It is a wild fairy-tale, full of extrava- 
gant and impossible adventures ; full, too, of a marvel- 
lous sense of physical and moral beauty, the intense 
combination of which appears to me to form the dis- 
tinctive feature of this poet. The same qualities, in 
more stern and didactic form, appear in Cleanness, which 
is a collection of Biblical paraphrases, and in Patience, 
which retells the story of Jonah ; but they take fresh 
lustre in the singularly beautiful elegy on the daughter 
of the poet,. which is called the Pearl. This poem, for 
modern taste a little too gemmed and glassy in its 
descriptive parts, possesses a delicate moral elevation 
which lifts it high above afl other allegorical romances 
of its class. I am, however, inclined to set the poetical 
merits of Sir Gatvain and the Green Knight higher still. 
The struggles of the knight to resist the seductions of 
Morgan la Fay are described in terms which must be 
attributed to the English poet's credit, and the psychol- 
ogy of which seems as modern as it is ingenious, while 
over the whole poem there is shed, like a magical dye, 
the sunset colour of the passing Age of Faith. 

It seems on the whole to be probable that the charm- 
ing poet, whom we do not dare to call Ralph Strode, 
composed the four works of which we have just spoken, 
between 1355 and 1360. In his hands the alliterative 
paraphrase of the fourteenth century reached its most 
refined expression. But the author of Sir Gawain had not 
the narrative force, nor the author of Cleanness the satiric 
fervour, to inaugurate a new school of English poetry. 
His sweet and cloistered talent, with its love of vivid 
colours, blight belts, sparkling jewels, and enamelled 
flowers, passed into complete obscurity at the approach 
of that vehement genius of which we have now to speak. 



LANGLAND 7 

The earliest poem of high value which we meet with in 
modern English literature is the thrilling and mysterious 
Visioit of Piers Plowman. According to the view which 
we choose to adopt, this brilliant satire may be taken as 
closing the mediaeval fiction of England or as starting 
her modern popular poetry, Visio willelmi de petro plow- 
mmi is the only title of this work which has come down 
to us, and the only contemporary hint of its authorship. 
Although the popularity of the poem was extreme, the 
writer is not mentioned in a single record. The Court 
poets were in the ascendant, and preserved each others' 
names ; the author of the Vision was outside the pale of 
fashion, a preserver of antiquated forms, a barbarous 
opponent of French tendencies in culture. It is neces- 
sary, therefore, to make what use we can of reports set 
down long after his death, and still better, of what revela- 
tions he is induced to make in the course of his poem. 
All these have been carefully examined, and their con- 
jectural result is sufficient to enable us to form a toler- 
ably distinct portrait of one of the greatest writers of 
the Middle Ages. 

There is little doubt that his name was William 
Langland (or William of Langley) ; that he was born, 
about 1332, at Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire; that 
he was of humble birth, though not of the humblest ; 
that he was brought up for the Church, but never passed 
out of the lesser orders ; that he suffered the loss of most 
that was dear to him in the great plague of 1349 ; that 
he came up to London and became a canonical singer — 
became, in fact, a chaunter at St. Paul's, by which he 
contrived to eke out a poor livelihood for Kit, his wife, 
and for Nicolette, his daughter. He was a poor man, 
*' roaming about robed in russet," living, unseen, in a 



8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

little house in Cornhill. His youth was spent wandering 
on the Malvern Hills, which left so deep an impress on 
his imagination that he mentions them three times in a 
poem otherwise essentially untopographical. It has been 
thought that he returned to Malvern at the close of his 
life; in 1399 he was probably at Bristol. He fades out 
of our sight as the century closes. It was early reported 
that he was a Benedictine at Worcester, and a fellow of 
Oriel College at Oxford. Neither statement is confirmed, 
and the second is highly improbable. Langland was a 
man of the people, without social claims of any kind, an. 
observer of the trend of '' average English opinion." 

The Vision of Piers Plowman has come down to us in 
not fewer than forty-five MS. copies. But these, on 
collation, prove to belong to three distinct texts. It is 
almost certain that Langland wrote the first draft of his 
poem in 1 362, rewrote it in 1 377, and revised it again, with 
large additions, somewhere between 1392 and 1398. Of 
these, the earliest contains twelve, and the latest twenty- 
three passiis or cantos, the modifications being of so 
general a character that the three texts may almost be 
considered as distinct poems on the same subject. The 
existence of the 1362 text gives Langland a remarkable 
precedence among the poets of the age, a precedence 
which is not always sufficiently recognised by those who 
speak of Chaucer. It is improbable that we possess a line, 
even of Chaucer's translation, earlier than about 1368, 
while the literary value of Chaucer's work was for twenty 
years after 1362 to remain much inferior to Langland's. 
In the Vision of Piers Plowman the great alliterative school 
of West-Midland verse culminated in a masterpiece, the 
prestige of which preserves that school from being a 
mere curiosity for the learned. In spite of its relative 



LANGLAND 9 

difficulty, Piers Plowman will now always remain, with 
the Canterbury Tales, one of the two great popular 
classics of the fourteenth century. 

While Chaucer and the other Court poets, with an in- 
stinctive sense of the direction which English prosody 
would take, accepted the new metrical system, introduced 
from Italy and France, Langland remained obstinately 
faithful to the old English verse, the unrhymed allitera- 
tive line of four beats, of which his poem is now the best- 
known type and example : 

" And then hited Love in a loiid ndte, 

' Till the day dawned these damsels ddnced" 

in its most obvious form ; in its more rugged shape : 

" / have as much pity of pdor men as pedlar hath of cats 
That would kill them, if he cdtch them might, for cdvetise of their skins!* 

It is a mistake to seek for perfect accuracy in Lang- 
land's versification. He hurries on, often in breathless 
intensity, and he does not trouble to consider whether he 
has the proper number of " rhyme-letters " (the initial 
letters of the strong syllables), or whether the syllables 
themselves are not sometimes weak. The great thing is 
to hasten forward, to pour forth the torrent of moral 
passion. The poem should be read aloud, impetuously 
but somewhat monotonously, and when the reader has 
grasped the scheme of the metre its difficulties will be 
found to have disappeared. 

The poem which is generically called the Visio de 

petro plowmari consists of several portions which are not 

closely or very intelligibly welded together. It must be 

remembered that Langland is essentially inartistic : he 

has no concern with the construction of his poem or the 

balance of its parts. He has a solemn word to say to 
2 



lo MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

England, and he must say it ; but the form in which he 
says it is immaterial to him. He does not address a 
critical audience ; he speaks to the common people, 
in common verse ; he is vates, not artifex, and for those 
who trouble themselves about the exterior parts of 
poetry he has a rude disdain. Even the figure of Piers 
Plowman, which gives name to the whole, is not once 
introduced until we are half through the original draft 
of the poem. Of the three texts, that of 1377 is usually 
considered the most perfect. This consists of a prologue, 
in which the allegorical vision is introduced, and of four 
cantos mainly dealing with the adventures of Meed the 
Maid ; then follow, in three more cantos, the Vision of 
the Seven Deadly Sins, who repent, and are led to the 
shrine of Divine Truth by a mysterious ploughman 
named Piers. This first poem ends, rather abruptly, 
with a contest between Piers and a worldly priest about 
the validity of indulgences. 

To this, the proper Vision of Piers Plowman, are 
appended the three long poems, in the same metre, 
named Do-well, Do-bet (that is better), and Do-best. These 
defy analysis, for they proceed upon no distinct lines. 
Do-ivell is mainly didactic and hortative ; its sermons 
made a deep impression on the contemporary conscience. 
Modern readers, however, will turn with greater pleasure 
to Do-bet, which contains the magnificent scene of the 
Harrowing of Hell, which was not equalled for pure 
sublimity in English poetry until Milton wrote. B}^ this 
time the reader perceives that Piers Plowman has become 
a disguise of Christ Himself, Christ labouring for souls, 
a man with men. In Do-bet the stormy gloom which 
hangs over most of Langland's threatening and denun- 
ciatory verse is lifted ; the eighteenth canto closes in 



LANGLAND 1 1 

a diapason of lutes, of trumpets, ''men ringing to the 
resurrection/' and ail the ghosts of spiritual darkness 
fleeing from the splendour of Easter morning. In Do- 
best the poet's constitutional melancholy settles upon 
him again. He sees life once more as it is — broken, 
bitter, full of disappointment and anguish. He awakens 
weeping, having seen Conscience start on a hopeless 
pilgrimage in search of the lost and divine Plowman. 

In the form of his great work Langland adopts the 
mediaeval habit of the dream. But this is almost his only 
concession to Latin forms. Alone among the principal 
writers of his age he looks away from Europe, continues 
the old Teutonic tradition, and is satisfied with an in- 
spiration that is purely English. That he had read the 
Roman de la Rose and the Pelerijiage of Deguileville is 
not to be doubted ; recent investigations into the work 
and life of Rutebeuf (1230 ?-i300 ?) have revealed re- 
semblances between his religious satires and those of 
Langland which can hardly be accidental. It is now 
recognised that the vocabulary of the Vision contains 
no fewer ^French words than that of Chaucer, from 
which, indeed, it can scarcely be distinguished. But 
the whole temper and tendency of Langland is English, 
is anti-French ; he is quite insulated from Continental 
sympathies. He is an example of what thoughtful 
middle -class Englishmen were in the last years of 
Edward III., during the great wars vrith France, and 
while the plague, in successive spasms, was decimating 
the country. 

The Vision is full of wonderful pictures of the life of 
the poor. Langland was no Wyclifhte, as was early 
supposed ; in his denunciations of clerical abuse there 
was no element of heterodoxy. He saw but one thing, 



12 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the necessity of upright individual conduct ; of this con- 
duct the ploughman on the Malvern Hills was one with 
Pope or Christ — a living representation of that essential 
Truth which is deity. The main elements in his stormy 
volubility are sincerity and pity. Piers is '^Truth's pil- 
grim at the plough " ; he is obliged to expose the rich in 
their greediness, their cruelty, their lasciviousness. Nor 
does he see the poor as spotless lambs, but their sorrows 
fill him with a divine pity, such a tenderness of heart as 
modern literature had not until that time expressed, such 
as modern life had until then scarcely felt. Another view 
of Piers Plowjnan M. Jusserand acutely notes when he says 
that it ^'almost seems a commentary on the Rolls of Par- 
liament." It is an epitome of the social and political life 
of England, and particularly of London, seen from within 
and from belov/, without regard to what might be thought 
above and outside the class of workers. It is the founda- 
tion of the democratic literature of England, and a re- 
pository of picturesque observations absolutely unique 
and invaluable. 

The firmness with which Langland began, and the 
inflexibility with which he continued his life's work in 
poetry, strangely contrast with the uncertain and tenta- 
tive steps which his greater coeval took in the practice of 
his art. It is now generally believed that the birth of 
Geoffrey Chaucer must have taken place not long 
before and not long after 1338 ; if this be the case, he 
was probably about six years the junior of Langland. 
But Chaucer was thirty-five years of age before he saw 
his way to the production of anything really valuable 
in verse. His career first throws light on his literary 
vocation when we learn that, in 1359, he took part in 
Edward III.'s famous invasion of France. He was taken 



LANGLAND 13 

prisoner in a skirmish in Burgundy, and was ransomed 
by the King j after nearly a year on French soil Chaucer 
returned to England. It is not easy to overrate the 
importance of this expedition, made at the very age when 
the perceptions are most vivid. France set its seal on 
the genius of the poet, and already, we cannot doubt, 
the bias of his mind was formed. He was the personal 
servant of the King's daughter-in-law ; he must have 
shown himself courtly, for he presently becomes valet de 
chambre to Edward himself. In this his early youth, 
while Langland is identifying himself in poverty with the 
ploughmen of the Malvern Hills, Chaucer is taking for 
life the stamp of a courtier and a man of fashion. 

He developed an ardent admiration for the chivalrous 
and courtly poets of the France of his own day ; he 
read, and presently he imitated, Machault, Guillaume de 
Deguileville, Eustache Deschamps, and the less-known 
master whom he calls ^^Graunson, flower of them that 
make in France.'' He takes their emblems, their 
blossoms^ their conventional forms, and prepares to 
introduce them, with unparalleled elegance, to gentle 
readers in England. But still more than these his con- 
temporaries, he admires the old masters of allegory, 
Lorris and Meung, whose Roman de la Rose^ in not 
less than twenty-two thousand verses, had now for 
nearly a hundred years been the model and masterpiece 
of all mediaeval French poetry. To study French verse 
in 1360 was to find the prestige of the Roman de la Rose 
absolutely predominant. Poetry could scarcely be con- 
ceived of, save in relation with that laborious allegory, so 
tedious to us in its primitive psychology, so intensely 
fascinating and seductive to the puerile imaginahon 
of the Middle Ages. It was natural that Chaucer's 



14 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

first essay should be to place this masterpiece in 
English hands, and accordingly a translation of the 
Romaunt of the Rose is the earliest known production 
of the English poet. 

That he completed this labour of love is uncertain. 
Deschamps, in a famous ballad addressed to that 
*^ grant translateur, noble Geofifroy Chancier/' compli- 
ments him on having scattered the petals and planted 
the tree of the Rose in the Island of the Giants, Albia. 
But it is now beheved that only the first 1705 lines of the 
translation which we possess are Chaucer's, and even 
these have been questioned. He certainly translated, 
about 1366, an Ay B, Cy from Deguileville of Chalis ; this 
we possess, and an original poem of about the same date, 
the Complaint unto Pitj/y interesting because in it we 
find the earliest known example of that very important 
national stanzaic form, the rime royal of seven lines on 
three rhymes. In 1369 the Duchess Blanche of Gaunt 
died, and Chaucer celebrated her virtues in a long octo- 
syllabic poem, in the course of which he told the story of 
Alcyone and Ceyx. This is his first appearance as a lead- 
ing English writer, although it is more than possible that 
he had already written creditable works which time hus 
neglected to spare. 

In the Book of the Duchess the hand of Chaucer is still 
untrained, but that element of freshness, of April dewi- 
ness and laughing brightness, which was to continue to 
be his primal quality, is already prominent. Even on so 
sad an occasion he cannot keep out of his elegy the pure 
blue blaze of noon, the red and white of fallen flowers, 
the song of birds, the murmur of summer foliage. The 
great John of Gaunt is himself introduced, in a turn of 
tlie forest, and the poet with delicate tact persuades him 



CHAUCER 15 

to describe his wife and so regain composure. Chaucer 
owed much to Machault in the external machinery of 
this poem, which extends to thirteen hundred hues, but 
the pathos and the charm are all his own. That he wrote 
many other juvenile poems before he reached the age of 
thirty or thirty-five, may be taken for certain, but they 
are lost to us. It is possible that the loss is not serious, 
for Chaucer was still in bondage to the French, and it is 
highly unlikely that he dared, as yet, to sail away from 
the convention of his masters. 

He did not learn to be an original poet until he had 
passed through France and left it behind him. In 1372 
he w^ent on the King's business to Genoa and Florence, 
and this was the first of several Italian expeditions, in the 
course of which his eyes were singularly opened to the 
budding glories of the Renaissance, and his ears tuned 
to the liquid magic of Italian verse. It may be conjec- 
tured that he was chosen for this mission because of his 
unusual acquaintance with the Italian tongue. It is diffi- 
cult not to be convinced that he enjoyed the conversation 
of Petrarch, though if he had known Boccaccio person- 
ally he would hardly have called him Lollius ; he certainly 
brought back to England the first echo of the fame of 
Tuscan poetry and the first warmth of its influence on 
European letters. Both these poets scarcely survived 
Chaucer's first visit to their country. The ten years, 
however, from 1372 to 1382 have left little mark on 
Chaucer's actual production, so far as it has come down 
to us. We may attribute to the close of that decade 
the Complaint of Mars and the Parliament of Fowlsj 
poems of no very great value in themselves, but interest- 
ing as showing that Chaucer had completely abandoned 
his imitation of French models^ in favour of a style more 



i6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

fully his own, and more in harmony with classical and 
Italian taste. In the latter of these pieces the study of 
Dante and of Boccaccio is undisguised. Still, it is 
curious to observe that at the age of about forty-five, one 
of the greatest poets of Europe had, so far as we know, 
composed absolutely nothing which could give him 
prominence in literary history. 

The excitement caused by the great democratic or 
socialistic rising of 1381 was followed by, and perhaps 
resulted in, a marvellous quickening of intellectual life 
in England. There was an immediate revival in all the 
branches of literature, and it is to this approximate date 
that w^e owe the Bible of Wy cliff e and the romance of 
Sir John Mandcville ; now Gower, observing that ''few 
men indite our English," set down the Latin of his Vox 
Clainantis in order that he might compose a long poem in 
English " for King Richard's sake." Chaucer, too, who so 
long while had been falteringly learning and attempting 
to practise the art of song, ventured, about 1382, on the 
composition of the Troilus and Cressida, the first work in 
which the magnificence of Chaucer reveals itself. This 
was an adaptation of II Filostrato of Boccaccio, in five long 
books of rime royal. It has been shown that Chaucer 
w^as not content wdth a translation from the Italian, 
which would have occupied but a third of his poem, but 
that more than half is, so far as we can discover, entirely 
his own invention. He used the text of Boccaccio, whom 
he mysteriously names " Lollius," as a centre round 
which to weave the embroideries of his own fancy, and 
it is a critical error to dismiss Troilus and Cressida as a 
mere paraphrase. It is essentially an original poem of 
great value and significance. The careful study of this 
epos has revealed the fact that Chaucer's knowledge of 



CHAUCER 17 

Italian literature was not slight and superficial, as had 
been supposed, but profound. He quotes, in the course 
of Troilus and Cressida, from Dante, Petrarch, Benoit, the 
Teseide of Boccaccio, and the Latin Trojan History of 
Guido delle Colonne. While fascinated by the vigour of 
these new sources of inspiration, he seems to have w^hoUy 
laid aside his study of his old beloved but languid poets 
of France. 

It may fairly be said that the narrative love-poetry of 
England, which has developed in so many and so rich 
directions, practically opens with Chaucer's delicate, 
melancholy Troilus a^td Cressida. In the last book of this 
work so little trace is found of that jollity and gust of life 
which are held to be the special characteristics of this 
great poet, that it has been conjectured that Chaucer was 
now passing through some distressing crisis in his private 
life. This sadness is certainly continued in what is his 
next contribution to literature, the unfinished but ex- 
tended visionary poem called the House of Fame. This 
piece is written in octosyllabic rhymed verse, such as 
Barbour had employed in the Bruce some ten years earlier. 
It bears very numerous traces of the careful study of 
Dante ; but no Italian poem has been discovered of 
which it can be considered a paraphrase. In the House 
of Fame Chaucer is seen to have gained great ease and 
skill, to have learned to proceed without reference to 
any model or master, and to have discovered how to 
use that native fund of humour which he had hitherto 
kept in abeyance. In short, it is here that we first begin 
to catch the personal voice of Chaucer, a sound such as 
English literature had never heard before in all the cen- 
turies of its existence. 

The spring of 1385 is the date now believed to be that 



1 8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

at which Chaucer composed his next great work, the 
admirable Legend of Good Woinen. It consists of a 
prologue, followed by nine (or rather ten) stories of 
virtuous classical heroines. The style of this poem 
exemplifies a sudden advance in Chaucer's art, for 
which it is difficult to account ; and there is evidence 
that it was regarded with astonishment by contem- 
porary readers, as something which revealed a beauty 
hitherto undreamed of. Here also he first adventures 
upon the definition and evolution of character, the ten 
'^good women" being distinguished from one another 
by numerous traits of psychology, delicately observed. 
It is to be noticed, moreover, that it is in the Legend 
of Good Women that Chaucer first employs his greatest 
gift to English prosody, the heroic couplet of five beats 
each line. 

" A thousand times have I heard men tell 
That there is joy in heav'n a?id pain in helV — 

so the Prologue opens, and this is the earliest of many 
tens of thousands of '' correct" ten-syllable couplets in 
English. It is here that Chaucer adopts the daisy as his 
flower of flowers, inventing a pretty legend that Alcestis 
was transformed into a marguerite. But this blossom 
had been adopted before his time by Machault and 
others, Margaret being a common Christian name in 
the royal house of France. Chaucer owed the idea of 
this poem to Boccaccio, but in the treatment of it there 
is little or no trace of exotic influences. He had now 
learned to walk alone, without even a staff to support his 
footsteps. We hasten on, however, because the Legend 
of Good Women, admirable and charming as it is, seems 
to the general student to be but the vestibule leading us 



CHAUCER 19 

to and preparing us for the vast and splendid temple of 
the Canterbury Tales. 

It is believed that Chaucer was approaching his fiftieth 
year when it occurred to him to illustrate the daily life 
of his age in England by means of a series of metrical 
tales fitted into a framework of humorous reflection 
and description. The phrase of Dryden cannot be 
bettered : Chaucer took '' into the compass of his Canter- 
bury Tales the various manners and humours of the 
whole English nation." He had been gradually reject- 
ing the laboured tradition of the past ; he had been 
gradually freeing himself from the vain repetitions, the 
elegant; bloodless conventions, the superficial and arti- 
ficial graces of the medieval minstrels. He had, after 
long labour, and careful comparative study of Italian 
models, contrived to create a form, a method of ex- 
pression, v/hich was extremely distingui-shed and entirely 
individual to himself. One thing remained undone, 
namely, to put this new manner of writing at the dis- 
posal of a thoroughly new and a thoroughly national 
subject. This he would now, about 1386, begin to do, 
and by that act would rise into the first order of the 
world's poets. 

It is the opinion of Mr. Skeat that the first of the 
Canterbury Tales to be conceived was the Monk's Tale, 
and that this was originally designed to form part 
of a Legend of Good Men, which was presently merged 
in the larger work. There can be no question that 
Chaucer was long engaged in collecting material for his 
great panoramic poem before he began to put the parts 
of it into such sequence as they now possess. Moreover, 
Y/e cannot doubt that he had by him abundant stores 
of verse, composed earlier, and with no thought of the 



20 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Canterbury Tales. Mr. W. S. McCormick points out as 
examples of this incorporated matter, the '' Legend of 
St. Cecile," which required no change, and " Palemon 
and Arcite/' which had to be rewritten. Until Henry 
Bradshaw, with his brilliant critical instinct, discovered 
or divined the plan on which the Canterbury Tales 
must have been executed, the work appeared simply 
chaotic. Further investigation has so far cleared up the 
plan, that we are 'now able to realise fairly well how the 
edifice rose in the architect's imagination, although but 
a fragment was ever built. It is fortunate, indeed, that 
Chaucer lived to cortiplete the Prologue, which is not 
merely one of the most enchanting of all poems, but is 
absolutely essential to us in any consideration of the aim 
of its author. 

From the Prologue we learn that Chaucer's idea was 
to collect at the Tabard Inn a number of persons, repre- 
sentative of all ranks and classes in his day, all proposing 
to start together on a pilgrimage. Each pilgrim 

" In this voyage shall tell en tales twain — 
To Canterbury-ward^ I mean it so^ 
And homeward he shall tellen other two^^ 

each pilgrim, therefore, telling four tales in all. This 
would have implied the writing of at least a hundred and 
twenty narrative poems, and it seems astonishing that 
Chaucer, whose health, we may surmise, was already 
failing, and who looked upon himself as an old man, 
should have been ready to adventure upon so vast an 
enterprise. As it is, we possess about twenty-five finished 
tales, a great mass of poetical literature, and as much, 
perhaps, as we could now study with profit ; yet, as we 
should always realise, not a fourth part of what the poet 



CHAUCER 21 

planned. That the writings of Chaucer {Ti^oilus and 
Cressida being the main exception) form a succession of 
fragments, each abandoned as if in a fury of artistic im- 
patience to make room for a more ambitious scheme, and 
that the last and most splendid is the most fragmentary^ of 
all, these are, indeed, pathetic considerations. Like Leo- 
nardo da Vinci in another art, the zeal of Chaucer was 
insatiable, and in trying to secure all the perfections he 
brought no important enterprise to completion. 

The pilgrims start in merriment from the Tabard, but 
they never arrive at Canterbury,; the supper which mine 
host was to give to the best teller was never eaten and 
never ordered. The pilgrim who spoke first was the 
Knight, whose tale of ^^ Palemon and Arcite " had doubt- 
less been for some time in the poet's desk, since it exem- 
plifies the imitation of Boccaccio which Chaucer had by 
1387 outworn ; it is the poet's grandest achievement in 
his Italian manner. This tale has a noble remoteness 
from the ordinary joys and sorrows of mankind ; it is 
suitably placed in the mouth of '^ a very perfect, gentle 
knight " ; but Chaucer, whose one design was to escape 
from the superfine monotony of fourteenth-century lite- 
rature, and to speak in variety and freshness to the 
comm.on reader, immediately relieves the strain by permit- 
ting the rude Miller, with his coarse and humorous tale, to 
burst in. These transitions are managed with great tact, 
and, no doubt, if Chaucer had completed his design, they 
would have been universal ; some dignified -or feminine 
figure would doubtless have separated the Miller from 
the Reeve. We have an instance of Chaucer's feelinj^ in 
this matter in the case of the Prioress's Tale, where the 
poignant story of Hugh of Lincoln is preluded by the 
Shipman's gross and ''merry" anecdote, and succeeded by 



2 2 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the portentous parody of ^* Sir Thopas." The tendency 
of the age had run too heavily in the direction of lugu- 
brious and fatal narratives ; Chaucer, keenly alive to the 
wants of the general reader, sees that the facetious ele- 
ment must no longer be omitted, nay, must actually pre- 
ponderate, if the Canterbury Tales is to be a great popular 
poem. Hence it is probable that as he progressed with 
the evolution of his scheme, tragedies v/ere more and 
more excluded in favour of fun and high spirits, and 
that the complexion of the work was growing more and 
more cheerful up to the moment when it was suddenly 
stopped by Chaucer's death. It is particularly to be 
noted that Chaucer brings a specimen of every then 
familiar form of literature into his scheme — animal 
stories, fabliaux comic and serious, chivalric romances, 
Italian legends, ballads, sermons, traveller's tales of 
magic, Breton lays ; in short, whatever could be ex- 
pected to form the intellectual pabulum of his readers 
was so much grist to his mill, drawn in to increase the 
variety and widen the scope of his variegated picture of 
life. 

Chaucer is the last and in certain aspects the greatest 
of the mediaeval poets of Europe. Boccaccio had seen 
the need of popularising the sources of poetry, of break- 
ing down the thorny hedge of aristocratic protection 
which guarded the rose of imagination from vulgar hands ; 
but it was Chaucer who let the fresh winds of heaven 
into that over-perfumed and over-privileged enclosure. 
As Dante and Petrarch had immortalised the spiritual 
dignity and delicacy of the Middle Age, as Villon was to 
record in words of fire the squalid sufferings of its poor, 
so Chaucer summed up the social pleasures and aspira- 
tions of its burgher class in verses that remained without 



CHAUCER 



23 



a rival. In an age preoccupied with ideas and images^ 
Chaucer, by extraordinary good luck, had the originality 
to devote himself to character. Practically Vv^ithout a 
guide, and restrained by the novelty and difficulty of his 
task, he did not achieve his true work until old age had 
com.e upon him, and we are tantalised to find him taken 
from us at the very moment when he had at last achieved 
a complete mastery over his material. What Chaucer 
might not have produced had he lived ten years longer 
no one can endure to conjecture. 

For Vv^hat^ he has left us, fragmentary and tentative 
though it be, our gratitude should be unbounded. This 
is by far the greatest name in our literature until Shake- 
speare be reached. In the last ten years of the fourteenth 
century, Chaucer not merely provided us with a mass 
of enchanting verse, but he lifted the literature of his 
country out of its barbarous isolation and subserviency, 
and placed it in the foremost rank. It was not Chaucer's 
fault if a feebler race, succeeding him, let England slip 
back into a secondary or even a tertiary place. When 
he died, barely over sixty years of age, in 1400, not one 
writer in Europe surpassed him in reputation, not one 
approached him in genius. The advance which he had 
made in psychology was immense ; it was actually pre- 
mature, for no one was discovered, even in Italy, who 
could take advantage of his intelligent pre-eminence, 
and reach from that standpoint to still higher things. If 
the fifteenth century in Italy failed to take advantage of 
the examples of Petrarch and Boccaccio, still more truly 
may w^e say that in England it neglected to comprehend 
the discoveries of Chaucer. His splendid art w^as mis- 
understood, his quick and brilliant insight into human 
nature obscured, and a partial return to barbarism sue- 



24 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ceeded his splendid poetic civilisation. Appreciate his 
contemporaries and followers as we will, the closer our 
comparative study is, the more completely do we become 
convinced of the incomparable pre-eminence of Chaucer. 

The prosody of Chaucer's later and more elaborate 
works is not, as was so long supposed, an arbitrary or a 
loose one. Even Dryden knew no better than to dis- 
cover in the verse of the Cant£rbu7y Tales " a rude sweet- 
ness of a Scotch tune " ; it is obvious that he was quite 
unable to scan it. It was, on the contrary, not merely 
not ^' rude," but an artistic product of the utmost deli- 
cacy and niceness, a product which borrowed something 
from the old national measure, but was mainly an intro- 
duction into English of the fixed prosodies of the French 
and the Italians, the former for octosyllabic, the latter 
for decasyllabic verse. The rules of both, but especially 
the latter, are set, and of easy comprehension ; to learn 
to read Chaucer with a fit appreciation of the liquid 
sweetness of his versification is as easy an accomplish- 
ment as to learn to scan classical French verse, or easier. 
But it must be remembered that, in its polished art, it 
was a skill fully known only to its founder, and that, with 
Chaucer's death, the power to read his verses as he wrote 
them seems immediately to have begun to disappear. 
Chaucer gave English poetry an admirable prosody, but 
it was too fine a gift to be appreciated by those for whom 
it was created. 

An absence of critical judgment, at which it is need- 
less to "affect surprise, led the contemporaries and 
successors of Chaucer to mention almost upon equal 
terms with him his friend and elder John Gower. 
To modern criticism this comparison has seemed, what 
indeed it is, preposterous, and we have now gone 



GOWER 2S 

a little too far in the opposite direction. Gower is 
accused of extreme insipidity by those who, perhaps, 
have not read much of the current poetry of his 
day. He is sinuous, dull, uniform, but he does not de- 
serve to be swept away w^ith scorn. Much of his work 
has great historical value, much of it is skilfully narrated, 
and its long-winded author persists in producing some 
vague claim to be considered a poet. Gower was pro- 
bably ten or fifteen years older than Chaucer. His early 
French verse has mainly disappeared ; but w^e possess his 
Latin Vox Clamantis, and, what is much more important, 
his English poem in 30,000 verses, the Confessio Amaniis. 
Of this there are two existing versions, the first dedi- 
cated to Richard II., and composed about 1383, in which 
Chaucer is mentioned with friendly compliment ; the 
other dedicated to Henry IV., and possessing no mention 
of Chaucer, the date being about 1393. 

The Confessio Ajuantis consists of a prologue and eight 
books, in octosyllabic rhymed verse. The prologue is a 
strange prophetical performance, in the course of which 
the poet sketches the history of the world. In the body 
of the poem, the author, as a lover in despair, receives a 
visit from Venus, who commends him for confession to 
Genius, her priest. The lover's statement of his symp- 
toms and experience fills seven of the books, the eighth 
being occupied by his cure and absolution. The state- 
ment is constantly interrupted by the disquisitions of 
Genius, who tells one hundred and twelve stories by way 
of illustration of the passions. Those who depreciate 
Gower should recollect that this was the earliest large 
compendium of tales produced in the English language. 
Gower's use of English was far from being so consistent 
or so firm as that of Chaucer. He wavered between 
3 



26 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

French, Latin, and English, and was an old man before* 
he persuaded himself to employ the new composite 
tongue. He was an aristocrat, and it was with hesitation 
that he persuaded himself to quit the courtly French 
tongue. About 1399 Gower wrote an English poem 
in rime royal, the Praise of Peace, and lived on, ccecus 
et seiiex, until 1408, the admirer and panegyrist of 
Henry IV. to the last. 

The Northern dialect was illustrated by a great number 
of writers, most of them anonymous, and either retaining 
the alliterative forms of verse, or trying to adapt them to 
romance metres. Among these, to HUCHOWN are attri- 
buted the romances of Sweet Susan and the Great Geste of 
ArtJmr. Whether the fine Scottish paraphrase of Lancelot 
of the Lake, which Mr. Skeat has printed, is due to the 
same vague Huchown, or Hugh, is uncertain. There was 
a whole crop of Gawain and Arthur romances in the 
Northern dialect ; but by far the most considerable poet 
of Scotland in the fourteenth century was John Barbour, 
Archdeacon of Aberdeen, who repeatedly visited France, 
and who, in a limited and inelastic but quite undeniable 
shape, accepted or independently invented a Southern 
prosody, not unlike that of Chaucer, but founded in 
imitation of the Roman de la Rose. It would seem that 
the writings of Barbour were once extremely numerous, 
but only those of his late age survive. About 1375, being 
then probably sixty years old, he began his long historical 
romance of the Bruce, which we still possess, which en- 
joyed an immense popularity, and which is usually con- 
sidered one of the glories of Scottish literature. Barbour 
also wrote a Book of Troy, oi which fragments are preserved, 
and after he was seventy composed, in conventional para- 
phrase, a Legend of the Saints, of which more than thirty 



BARBOUR 27 

thousand verses have been printed. He was evidently a 
very abundant writer, since the names of other important 
works of his have come down to us. 

It is by the Bruce alone, however, that we have to 
judge Barbour. This is not a mere chronicle in octo- 
syllabic rhymed verse ; it is a national epic of real 
value. Barbour is not a brilliant writer, and, in strange 
contradistinction to the Scotch poets who followed him, 
he is austerely bare of ornament. He tells a patriotic 
story very simply and fluently, with a con-stant appeal to 
chivalrous instincts, and with a remarkable absence of all 
mythological machinery. The BrucBy which is now com- 
monly divided into twenty long books, is the chief literary 
relic of old Scotland, and has, perhaps, never ceased to 
make a successful appeal to the ingenhim perfervidiim 
Scotorum. The intensity of Barbour's sense of the value 
of political independence, expressed in lines such as 

''^ Ah ! freedom is a noble thine;- . . . 
He lives at ease that freely lives'^ 

adds a sympathetic beauty to his otherwise somewhat 
bald and dry historical narratives. His absence of 
pedantry, his singular passion for truth in an age given 
up to vagueness about fact, and his large grasp of events, 
make us regret Barbour's tantalising lack of inspiration. 
At the close of his life he indited that enormous trans- 
lation of the Legenda Aurea which has been already 
mentioned, and which they may read who can. 

In spite of the great importance and popularity of 
Langland's Vision, the retrograde and insular manner 
of writing did not hold its own against the new prosody 
and the influences from Italy and France. Much, how- 
ever, was still written in the early alliterative manner, and 



2 8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

an anonymous W3^cli£fite, in the very last years of the 
century, produced a powerful satire, entitled Piers the 
Ploughmmi^s Creed, extending to more than eight hundred 
verses. It is thought that to the same hand we owe the 
Ploughman's Tale, long bound up among the poems of 
Chaucer, to whose language and manner of writing it 
bears no resemblance. The Creed is the better piece of 
the two ; it is imitative of Langland, but its great vivacity 
of style, and its value as illuminating the condition of 
the middle and lower classes, and the dissensions in the 
English Church, can scarcely be exaggerated. In this 
poem the ploughman has no supernatural character or 
attributes. The description of a rich Dominican convent 
is perhaps the best-known specimen of a powerful poem 
to the importance of which, strangely enough, Pope was 
the first to draw attention. The author, though he had 
not the vehement energy of Langland, was a close and 
picturesque observer of manners. The date of the Creed 
has been conjectured as 1394, and that of the Tale as 
some years earlier than 1399. Another work of some- 
what the same class, Richard theRedeless, an expostulation 
with Richard II., has now pretty definitely been assigned 
to the old age of Langland himself. It is to be supposed 
that a vast amount of occasional verse of this national 
kind was produced, but did not survive till the invention 
of printing. 

As early as the twelfth century we find evidences of 
the performance in England of pageants and miracle 
plays in which the rudiments of the modern drama must 
have been observable. The earliest existing specimens, 
however, date from the fourteenth century, and we are 
able to judge of the literary value of these mysteries from 
the cycle of York Plays, forty-eight of which are preserved 



THE YORK PLAYS 29 

in an almost contemporary MS. We find the drama here 
no longer in a perfectly primitive state ; it is freed from 
the liturgical ritual and manipulated by the hands of lay- 
men. It is difficult to assign a date to the York Plays, 
but they are conjectured to have been composed between 
1350 and 1380. They are written in rhyme, and most of 
them in stanzas ; they deal with passages of the Bible, 
treated in such a way as to lead us to believe that what 
we possess is but a fragment of a vast dramatisation of 
the Scripture narrative, composed for a popular stage, 
and played by the city guilds in Corpus Christi week. 
The historical and linguistic interest of these miracle 
pageants, of course, greatly exceeds their purely literary 
value. It would be absurd to take them too seriously as 
dramatic poems ; yet there is not merely much vivacity 
and humour in their comic scenes, but an occasional 
felicity of expression Vv'hen they deal with the solemn 
portions of the story which they popularised. There 
were also Corpus Christi mysteries at Beverley, Chester, 
Wopdkirk, and Coventry ; the Reformation put a stop to 
them all. 

The splendid revival of poetry in England during the 
fourteenth century was accompanied by no similar 
awakening in prose. Our authors continued to affect 
the same lisping, stumbling speech to which earher 
generations had accustomed themselves. It is no ill 
task for a student to compare the prose treatises of 
Chaucer with his poetry, the latter so supple, brilliant, 
and vital, the former so dull and inert. The prose of the 
second half of the fourteenth century is almost entirely 
translated ; hardly any original performance of an Eng- 
lish mind in it is w^orthy to be named. 

About 1387 there w^as composed a prose treatise, entitled 



30 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the Testament of Love, which Mr. Bradley, with extraordi- 
nary ingenuity, has shown to have been written, probably 
in prison, by Thomas Usk, a London citizen who fell 
under the displeasure of the Duke of Gloucester, and was 
barbarously executed. It is a rambling sort of psycho- 
logical autobiography, in imitation of Boethius. Usk 
praises that ^^ noble, philosophical poet," Chaucer, while 
in his prologue he derides the habit of composing all 
serious matters in Latin or in French, and recommends 
his own book as a conspicuous innovation, so that he 
may be thought to have been before the age in critical 
insight. But to read the Testament of Love is to tramp 
across acres of dry sand. The art of being interesting in 
prose of English invention was yet to be discovered. 

Two translations, the one lay, the other sacred, repre- 
sent at its highest level of excellence the prose of the end 
of the century. The most picturesque production of the 
age is certainly the former of these, that geographical 
romance called the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. These 
spurious memoirs of a traveller who did not travel, were 
written in French, as is now believed, by a certain Bearded 
John of Burgundy, the pseudonym, perhaps, of an Eng- 
lishman who had fled from his own country and lived 
under that disguise at Liege. The original text was not 
circulated until about 1371 ; the admirable English ver- 
sion is some years later. Sir John Mandeville is a tissue 
of plagiarisms from early travellers, carefully woven 
together by a person who has enjoyed little personal 
opportunity of observation. This absurd book, which 
gulled the age to an amazing degree, is full of charm in 
its original form, and tells its incredible tales in the best 
mediaeval manner ; it has always been a storehouse of 
romantic anecdote. It was of great service to the national 



WYCLIFFE 31 

speech, since; whoever the translator was, he wrote a 
more graceful and fluent prose than any Englishman 
had done before him. 

A still more epoch-making event in English prose was 
the formation of that paraphrase of the Vulgate which is 
known as Wycliffe's Bible. This was a composite work, 
which occupied several heterodox hands from about 
1380 to 1388. John Wycliffe's career as a reforming 
Churchman had already reached its apogee before it 
appears to have occurred to him, possibly under the 
influence of Langland's great poem, that to appeal to 
the masses of the English nation it was necessary to write 
in their own language, and not, as he had hitherto so 
effectively done, in Latin. His energy was thereupon, 
during the four remaining years of his life, set on the 
cultivation of the vernacular, and, above all, on the edit- 
ing, for the first time, of a complete Bible in English. 
He seems to have set his friend Nicholas of Hereford to 
translate the Old Testament, and when that disciple, to 
escape recantation, ffed to Rome in 1382, his work was 
found to be complete up to the middle of Baruch. 
Wycliffe himself finished the Apocrypha, his version of 
the New Testament being already done. He died in 
1384, leaving his pupil and curate John Purvey, the 
librarian of the Lollards, to revise the whole translation, 
a task which was completed in 1388. The general 
Prologue to the whole Bible is beheved to be the work 
of Purvey ; but the entire question of the authorship of 
the Wycliffite books remains very obscure. 

It is impossible to overestimate the gift of Wycliffe to 
English prose in placing the Bible at the command of 
every common reader. But the value of Wycliffe as an 
independent writer may easily be exaggerated. If we 



32 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

compare his New Testament with the work of Nicholas of 
Hereford, we may conjecture that VVycliffe had a certain 
conception of style undreamed of by his wooden disciple. 
But his own manner is exceedingly hard and wearisome, 
without suppleness of form. His sentences — except, 
occasionally, in his remarkable Sermons — follow certain 
Latinised formulas with fatiguing monotony. The danger 
which beset English prose at this time w^as that it might 
continue to lie inert in the state of clumsy flatness into 
which the decay of Anglo-Saxon influences, and the too- 
slavish following of Latin educational literature, had 
plunged it. As a matter of fact, it did lie there for some 
centuries, very slowly and very uncertainly rising in the 
wake of English verse to the dignity of harmonious art. 



II 

THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES 

1400-1560 

It is difficult to find any political or social reason for 
the literary decadence of the close of the Middle Ages, 
but the fact is patent that the reigns of the three Henries 
in England were marked by a strange and complete 
decline in the arts of composition. Not a single work of 
signal merit, whether in prose or verse, distinguishes the 
first half of the fifteenth century, and we are forced, in 
order to preserve the historical sequence, to record the 
careers and writings of men who at no other period 
would demand particular attention in a survey so rapid 
as this. In consequence, it is imperative that we should 
dwell a little on the productions of Occleve and Lydgate, 
although the original talent of these versifiers was small 
and their acquired skill almost contemptible. They are 
interesting, less from their pretensions to imagination 
than from this semi-official position as recognised makers 
of verse, carrying on the tradition of poetry, though with 
none of its ecstasy and charm. 

That Occleve and Lydgate were so imperfect in their 
grasp of those principles of poetry which Chaucer had 
formulated as to be unable to produce verse which had 
a superficial resemblance to his, is the more curious 
when we consider that they had enjoyed, or certainly 



34 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

might have enjoyed, the advantage of that master's 
personal instruction. Each of them was evidently more 
than thirty when Chaucer died. Of the two, Thomas 
OcCLEVE may have been slightly the elder. Neither 
had any real conception of the aim of Chaucer's work, or 
of the progress in intellectual civilisation which he had 
made. Even to remain where Chaucer left them was too 
much for these feeble bards to achieve ; they crept back 
into the barbarism of mediocrity. They imitated with 
great humbleness those very Frenchmen whom Chaucer 
had outgrown and had left behind him, and in their 
timid, trembling hands English literature ceased to com- 
mand the respect of Europe. 

Their very peculiar prosody, which offers far greater 
difficulty than those of Langland and Chaucer, is only 
intelligible if we conjecture that they never understood 
or early forgot the meaning of Chaucer's elaborate and 
scientific versification. Occleve, who h.ad been close to 
Chaucer, had a greater appreciation of the new smooth- 
ness and grace than John Lydgate, who had a most 
defective ear, and knew it. His verses are not to be 
scanned unless we suppose that he refused to follow 
Chaucer in the employment of a solid and coherent 
Southern prosody, but endeavoured to combine the use of 
rhyme and a measure of stanzaic form, with some remnant 
of the old national verse, retaining its strong accents and 
its groups of redundant syllables. Lydgate's native speech 
was Suffolk, and he used throughout life Saxon forms 
and habits of locution which were unfamiliar and even 
uncouth to a courtly London ear. Many critics, of 
whom the poet Gray was the earliest, have attempted to 
explain away the seeming rudeness of Lydgate, and to 
minimise the mean impression which he gives. But no 



OCCLEVE 35 

argument will make his metrical experiments appear 
successful, nor remove the conviction, of which he was 
himself conscious, that his ear was bad and tuneless. 

Occleve was a frivolous, tame-spirited creature, tainted 
with insanity. He is fond of chatting about himself, and, 
among other confidences, informs us that Chaucer wished 
him to be properly taught, but that the pupil "was dull, 
and learned little or naught." Occleve speaks so humbly 
of his own poetical performances that it would be harsh 
to dwell on their tedious character. The De Reginiine 
Principum {The Governail of Princes) y which seems to 
date from 141 1; is written in Occleve's favourite rime 
royal, and gives us as clear an impression of the man 
himself, of his style, of his views regarding contemporary 
history, and of his attitude towards the new English lan- 
guage, as could be gained by a laborious study of the 
remainder of his long-winded, monotonous works. It is 
a brave spirit which tires not before the five thousand 
lines of the De Regimine are closed, and one wonders 
whether Henry V., for whose use the poem was com- 
posed, ever became familiar with its contents. The 
author, who represents himself as "ripe unto the pit" 
with the results of an unseemly life, and as so cowardly 
that he only backbites those whom he dislikes, had cer- 
tainly not fallen into the sin of pride. We forgive much 
to him, because he preserved for us the coloured portrait 
of Chaucer. 

It is no great praise of Lydgate to say that he had a 
brisker talent than Occleve. Although he is careful to 
speak of Chaucer with constant respect, he is hardly, as 
Occleve was, his pupil. He rather imitates, often quite 
servilely and as though Chaucer had never written, the 
great French romantic poets of the fourteenth century. 



36 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

A large part of Lydgate's life was spent in the Benedictine 
monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, from which he made 
occasional excursions to Oxford and Paris. The fecun- 
dity of Lydgate was phenomenal ; Ritson, who deciphered 
his manuscripts until he must have hated the poet's very 
name, catalogued two hundred and fifty of his poems ; it 
is said that at his death his existing verses must have ex- 
ceeded 130,000 in number. No one living has read Lyd- 
gate in his entirety, and but few of his works have yet 
been edited. The excessive prolixity and uniformity of 
his style, which never rises and cannot fall, baffles all but 
the most persistent reader. His Tj'oy Book is a transla- 
tion from the Latin of Guido delle Colonne ; his Temple 
of Glass a continuation of the Hottse of Fame ; his Falls of 
Princes an imitation of a French paraphrase of Boccaccio, 
but little distinction of style can be perceived, whether 
the laborious epic is adapted from Italian or English or 
French sources. The Falls of PrinceSy printed in 1494, 
and accepted in the sixteenth century as a mediaeval 
classic, has been the most popular of the longer poems 
of Lydgate. It is believed to have been completed as 
late as 1438, and it displays in interesting ways the rapid 
development and modernisation of the English tongue. 
The student who desires to receive a favourable im- 
pression of the talent of Lydgate may be recommended 
to select the prologue of this enormous poem ; he will 
be rewarded by a conventional but pleasing eulogy of 
Chaucer. Lydgate, as Gray says, ^'wanted not art in 
raising the more tender emotions of the mind,'' and, on 
occasion, he can be diffusely picturesque. 

It is not probable that the entire works of Lydgate will 
ever be made accessible to readers, nor is it to be conceived 
that they would reward the labours of an editor. But 



CLANV@WE 37 

although it must be repeated that Lydgate is an author 
of inferior value, excessively prosy and long-winded, 
and strangely neglectful both of structure and of melody, 
a selection could probably be made from his writings 
which would do him greater justice than he does to him- 
self in his_intolerable prolixity. He has a pleasant vein 
of human pity, a sympathy with suffering that leads him 
to say, in a sort of deprecating undertone, very gentle 
and gracious things. He is a storehouse of odd and 
valuable antiquarian notes. His Pur le Roy, for instance, 
is a rich and copious account of the entry of Henry VI. 
into London in 1422 ; better known is his curious satire 
of London Lackpenny, Lydgate belongs — it is vain to 
deny it — to a period of retrogression and decay. But 
he had his merits, and the way to appreciate his verses is 
to compare them with the wretched, tuneless stuff put 
forth by his pupils and followers, such as Benedict 
Burgh. 

A poet. Sir Thomas Clanvowe, who had studied the 
manner of Chaucer with greater care than Lydgate, and 
had a more melodious native talent than Occleve, wrote 
about 1403 a short romance in an almost unique five- 
line stanza. The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, in which the 
author, although ^^ old and un lusty," falls asleep by a 
brook-side in May and hears the birds philosophising. 
Even in this mellifluous piece, which flows on like the 
rivulet it describes, the metrical laws of Chaucer are 
found to be in solution. Here occurs that reference to 
Woodstock which long led astray those who supposed 
Chaucer to be the author of this poem. Longer and 
much later, and still less like the genuine master, is the 
over-sweet, tedious romance in more than two thousand 
octosyllabic verses, boldly called CJiaucers Dreajn, though 



38 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Chaucer is not in any way concerned in it. It is a para- 
phrased translation of a vague, flowery story about a 
pilgrimage to an island of fair ladies ; it contains a suc- 
cession of pretty mediaeval pictures painted in faint, clear 
colours, like the illuminations in a missal, pale and deli- 
cate, in its affectation of primitive simplicity. 

Of all poems of the fifteenth century, however, that 
which is most faithful to the tradition of Chaucer, and 
continues it in the most intelligent way, is the Kings Quair 
(or Book). The history of this work is as romantic as 
possible, and yet probably authentic."^ James I. of 
Scotland, in 1405, not being yet eleven years old, was 
treacherously captured by the English, in time of truce, 
off Flamborough Head, and had been confined, first in 
the Tower, then in Windsor Castle, for eighteen years, 
when, seeing Johanne de Beaufort walking in the garden 
below his prison window, he fell violently in love with 
her. The match pleased the English Court ; they were 
married early in 1424, and proceeded as King and Queen 
to Scotland. The poem we are now discussing was 
written in the spring and early summer of 1423, and it 
describes, in exquisitely artless art, the progress of the 
wooing. This poet was murdered, in conditions of 
heartless cruelty, in 1437. We possess no other indubi- 
table work of his except a Scotch ballade. 

The Kings Quair, in more primitive periods of our 
literary history, was accepted as a contribution to Scotch 
poetry. But Dr. Skeat was the first to point out that 
although the foundation of it is in the Northern dialect, it 

1 In 1896 a very ingenious attempt was made by Mr. J. T. T. Brown to 
throw doubt on the authenticity of the King's Qitair ; but it cannot be said 
that any convincing evidence against the accepted tradition was produced. Mr. 
Brown's arguments were negative, and have been ably met by M. Jusserand. 



JAMES I. 39 

is carefully composed, as if in a foreign language, in the 
elaborate Midland or Southern dialect as used, and 
perhaps not a little as invented, by Chaucer. James I., 
indeed, is completely under the sway of his great pre- 
decessor ; no poet of the century repeats so many phrases 
copied from, or introduces so many allusions to, the 
writings of Chaucer as he does. He was immersed, it is 
evident, in the study and almost the idolatry of his 
master ; the first violent emotion of his sequestered life 
came upon him in that condition, and he burst into song 
with the language of Chaucer upon his lips. In spite of 
this state of pupilage, and in spite of his employment of 
the old French machinery of a dream, allegorical person- 
ages and supernatural conventions, the poem of James I. 
is a delicious one. His use of metre was highly in- 
telligent ; he neither deviated back towards the older 
national prosody, like Lydgate, nor stumbled aimlessly 
on, like Occleve ; he perceived what it was that Chaucer 
had been doing, and he pursued it with great firmness, 
so ^'hat, in the fifty or sixty years which divided the latest 
of the Canterbury Tales from TJie Flower and tJie Leaf, 
the Kings Quair is really the only English poem in 
which a modern ear can take genuine pleasure. 

In its analysis of moods of personal feeling, the King's 
Quair marks a distinct advance in fluent and lucid ex- 
pression. The poem is full, too, of romantic beauty; the 
description of the garden, of the mysterious and lovely 
being beheld wandering in its odorous mazes, of the 
nightingale, ''the little sweete nightingale " on "the 
smale greene twistis," is more accomplished, of its kind, 
than what any previous poet, save always Chaucer, had 
achieved. The pathos of the situation, our sympathy 
with the gallant and spirited royal poet, the historic 



40 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

exactitude of the events so beautifully recorded, the 
curious chance by which its manuscript was preserved 
unknown until the end of last century — all combine to 
give the Kin^s Quair a unique position in English 
literature. Alas ! as Rossetti sings : 

" Alas ! for the ivoful ihi7ig 
That a poet true and a frie?id of man 
I?i desperate days of bale and ba7i 
Sho2dd needs be bo?-?i a khigy 

These lines remind us of the Ballads which form so 
large and so vague a department of our national litera- 
ture. It is difficult to know where to place the romantic 
ballads, most of which have come down to us in a 
language and a metre which cannot be much earlier, at 
earliest, than the end of the sixteenth century. The 
original types of these national poems may have existed 
in the fifteenth century, but their antiquity is certainly a 
matter of speculation. Not so dubious, however, is the 
approximate date of the less beautiful but curious and 
significant ballads of the Robin Hood cycle. The latest 
general opinion about these is that they were brought 
together, in something like their present form, soon after 
1400. The earliest reference to the hero is found in 
Pie7's Plowman ; but a Scottish chronicler, writing in 1420, 
gives 1283 as the date when 

" Little John and Robin Hood 
Waythme7t were commended good ^ 
In Inglewood and Barnesdale 
They used all this time their travailJ^ 

We may conjecture that soon after 1300 there began to 
be composed ballads about a mythical yeoman who had 
taken to the forest in Yorkshire a generation earlier ; 



f 



ROBIN HOOD 41 

that all through the fourteenth century these ballads 
continued to be made and repeated — ^' harped at feasts" — 
until, soon after 1400, some crowder of superior poetical 
skill selected the best, and composed the Geste of Robin 
Hood ; and that throughout the fifteenth century other 
Robin Hood ballads were made, less original and autho- 
ritative than those in the Geste^ and that these latest are 
what we principally possess at present. 

In the Geste of Robin Hood, which is a long poem of 
456 stanzas, we possess the earliest and most genuine 
version of the narrative now existing. Here we find the 
good yeo.man, Robin Hood, a proud and courteous out- 
law, who has taken to the wood in Barnesdale. His 
companions are Little John, William Scarlet or Scathe- 
locke, and Much, the miller's son. Robin lives by hunt- 
ing the King's deer, and by gallantly robbing such barons, 
archbishops, and abbots as venture through his forest. 
But he is generous, and if a knight who is in trouble 
crosses his path, he will not let him go till they have 
dined together. The great enemy of Robin Hood and 
his men is the Sheriff of Nottingham, who represents 
the terrors of the common law. The proud sheriff 
accosts Little John, who says that his own name is Richard 
Greenleaf, and is accepted into the sheriff's service ; he 
betrays his master to Robin Hood under the forest, and 
the poor sheriff is bound and humiliated. It is a blow 
to our sentiment of romance, which has taught us since 
our childhood to picture Robin Hood sitting at a venison 
pasty, in the heart of Sherwood Forest, in company with 
his sweetheart and wife, Maid Marian, to learn that 
this lady is totally unknown to the genuine old ballads. 
There were ancient stories about Friar Tuck and Maid 
Marian, but not in connection v\'ith Robin Hood ; nor 
4 



42 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

were these stories, so far as we know, told in verse. The 
earhest ballad in which Robin Hood and Maid Marian 
are mentioned together is a very poor doggerel piece, 
probably later than the time of Shakespeare. We may 
notice that in the oldest ballads the scene is laid, indif- 
ferently, in Barnesdale Forest, near Pontefract, and fifty 
miles off in Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham. It has 
been conjectured that there were originally two cycles 
of ballads, the one a Barnesdale set, the other a Sher- 
wood set, and that the compiler of the Geste of Robin 
Hood helped himself to material from each of them. 

Lancastrian prose exemplifies the same conditions of 
intellectual weariness and decadence which depressed 
Lancastrian poetry ; but the decline is less marked, be- 
cause in the preceding century verse had flourished 
brilliantly, while prose had not flourished at all. After 
1400 we begin to see the English language more freely, 
though scarcely more gracefully, used, and for direct pur- 
poses, not merely or mainly in the form of translations. 
A very active and audacious talent was employed by 
Reginald Pecock in confuting the errors of those 
disciples of Wycliffe who were styled ^^ Lollards." He 
brought his attacks to a climax in 1449, when he was 
made Bishop of Chichester, and compiled his Repressor of 
overmuch Blaming of the Clergy, His other main produc- 
tion, the Book of Faithy is of somewhat later date. His 
sophistical ingenuity ultimately brought him to con- 
fusion and shame. The matter of Pecock is paradoxical 
and casuistical reasoning on controversial points, in 
which he secures the sympathy neither of the new 
thought nor of the old. That he wrote in English to 
secure a wider audience, and that he is on the whole 
fairly simple and direct in style, are symptoms of a 



CAPGRAVE 43 

general advance of English as an accepted language fit 
for literary and yet popular exercises. Still, the fate of 
the brilliant Bishop of Chichester proves that the time 
was not ripe for the discussion in English of any but the 
most obvious and harmless themes. Had Pecock con- 
fined himself to the Latin language, he might have closed 
a splendid career at Canterbury, instead of expiring like 
a starved lamp under the extinguisher of his prison at 
Thorney. 

We see Pecock bring the vernacular into the service of 
theological controversy, and we find another eminent 
divine, John Capgrave, employing it for purely historical 
purposes. The exact date of the composition of Cap- 
grave's Chronicle of England is uncertain ; he was pro- 
bably at work upon it through the second quarter of the 
century ; it closes with the year 1417. He is a much 
less rapid and audacious wTiter than Pecock. The atti- 
tude of Capgrave's mind is archaically mediaeval, and he 
possesses in large measure that blight of monotony and 
tameness which mars almost all Lancastrian literature. 
His historical importance is immense, especially if his 
Latin writings are taken into consideration ; but from 
the mere point of view of development of English style, 
Capgrave is negligible. Yet, so miserable is the poverty 
of the first half of the seventeenth century, when we have 
mentioned Pecock and Capgrave, there is no other prose 
writer to be named. English prose was still in its em- 
bryonic condition. In a familiar class, the Paston Letters^ 
W'hich date from 1422 onwards, offer us a precious oppor- 
tunity of judging in w^hat manner ordinary people of 
position expressed themselves in the discussion of daily 
experience. 

The second half of the fifteenth century was in England 



44 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

even more desperately barren of poetry than the first. 
In its absolute sterility, one solitary poem of merit de- 
mands attention, as much for its rarity as its positive 
charm. Some woman, whose name has not been pre- 
served, wrote after 1450, but in close discipleship of 
Chaucer, the beautiful little allegorical romances of 
The Flozver and the Leaf and the Assembly of Ladies, 
She took the idea of the former from Eustache Des- 
champs, who' had composed three such poems, in one 
of which he gave the prize to the leaf, and in another to 
the flower ; but the English piece begins as a translation 
of Machault's Dit du Vergier. It is accordingly wholly 
French in tone and character, and, coming at the very 
close of the Middle Ages, lights up, with a last flicker of 
imitation, the indebtedness of English mediaeval poetry 
to France. The charm of The Flower and the L^af iSy 
however, very considerable ; the anonymous poetess has 
a singularly graceful fluency, and she does not exag- 
gerate, as do some of her Scottish successors, the orna- 
ments of phraseology. Her poem well sums up the 
eclectic mediaeval mannerism. It opens with the praise 
of spring. Before sunrise the writer goes into a grove, 
where, listening for the nightingale, she turns down a 
narrow path and comes to an arbour. She hears a 
music of sweet voices, and sees advance a troop, "a 
world of ladies," with one noblest figure, waving a branch 
of agnus castus, in the midst of them. Then there 
appear to her strange men-at-arms, a gorgeous cavalry, 
who arrive, part, and joust. When the fight is over, the 
ladies advance, and lead the victors to a giant laurel-tree. 
These people were all in white ; but as they disappear, a 
company in green comes strolling up, also marvellously 
adorned. But the sun burns the flowers, and the ladies 



THE FLOWER AND THE LEAF 45 

too ; and then comes down a storm of wind and rain. 
The white come to the succour of the green, and all 
pass away in company. The poetess is left to the solemn 
presence of Diana and of Flora, and must choose between 
the Flower and the Leaf. ^' Unto the Leaf I owe mine 
observance," she answers, and the romance is over. 
The strange, delicate, unsubstantial poetry of mediaeval 
chivalry is over, too, in these pretty and melodious exer- 
cises in rime royal, the only considerable gift to early 
English literature made bv a woman. It is interesting to 
observe that she betra3v^s the half-century of developing 
language which divides her from Chaucer's death by her 
archaistic, that is to say, no longer perfectly natural, use 
of metrical ornament. 

From the miserable emptiness of English poetry after 
1450, it is agreeable to turn to Scotland, where the art 
was cultivated in some oddity and artificiality of form, 
indeed, but, on the whole, with singular success. Save 
in the one respect of the almost idolatrous study of 
Chaucer, the course of poetry in Scotland seems to have 
run in a totally independent channel. The Scotch poets 
of the Renaissance are connected with the mediaeval 
tradition, not by any Southern links, but by certain 
chroniclers who closely imitated Barbour, and who are 
only to be distinguished from him by their more modern 
use of language. About 1420 Andrew of Wyxtoux, a 
monk of St. Serf's, on Lochleven, completed an Original 
Chronicle of Scotland^ in nine books of octosyllabic verse ; 
he treated the subject from the ''origin" of the world, 
Wyntoun's history is less amusing than his fabulous 
legends, which he tehs eagerly and gaily, with a garrulous 
credulity. 

We pass on for some forty years, and, at the threshold 



46 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of the literary poetry of Scotland, are arrested by a 
survivor of the old didactic chronicle-school. Blind 
Harry, or Henry the Minstrel, composed about 1460, 
in the Northern dialect, a long Acts and Deeds of Sir 
William JVallace^ in which, for the first time, the heroic 
couplet was employed by a Scotch poet. Blind Harry 
was therefore, no doubt, acquainted with the writings of 
Chaucer, who invented that form of verse, but he displays 
no other Southern characteristic. His Wallace is the 
direct descendant of the Bruce of Barbour. This minstrel 
shows a certain advance in the freedom of his narrative, 
and in the psychological treatment of the hero he exhibits 
an occasional liveliness which may or may not be wholly 
voluntary, since the exigencies of rhyme drive him occa- 
sionally to strange shifts. He is singularly prosy, and not 
infrequently incoherent ; yet there is an air of sincerity 
and good faith about the Wallace which commands 
respect. Blind Harry, however, has none of the moral 
elevation of Barbour, and is, in fact, a writer of scant 
importance to any but philologists and historians. 

Henryson must have been writing about the same 
time as Blind Harry, but a century seems to divide them 
in literary temperament. The latter belonged to the 
Middle Ages ; the former was a child of the Renaissance, 
and its introducer into Scottish poetry. Of the Hfe of 
Robert Henryson little is known; it is conjectured 
that he was born about 1425, and died about 1506. He 
was notary-public, and perhaps schoolmaster, at Dun- 
fermline, and Dunbar tells us that he died there. 
Allusions to the Abbey of Dunfermline, and to walks 
*Mown on foot by Forth," add faintly to the picture 
we form of a merry, philosophical bard. Every critic 
quotes the stanza in which Henryson describes how he 



HENRYSON 47 

brightens the fire, wraps himself up, ^' takes a drink his 
spirits to comfort," and buries himself in the qiiair or 
volume in which glorious w^orthy Chaucer wrote of fair 
Cressid and lusty Troilus. This is one of those vivid, 
personal pictures, so sadly rare in our early literature, in 
which the veil of time seems suddenly rent for a mom.ent 
to let us look upon the great dead masters face to face. 

It would be absurd to represent Henryson as habitually 
lifted to such heights of felicitous expression; yet he is 
commonly vivid, natural, and observant to a degree be- 
yond any predecessor save Chaucer, whom he intelligently 
followed. In some of his poems he is purely allegorical, 
in the old French way. In Orpheus and Eu7y dicey which 
comes down to us through a unique copy printed in 
1508, a narrative in rime royal is followed by a moral in 
the heroic couplet, and all tends to show that Orpheus is 
the better spirit of man, which twitches the strings of the 
harp of conscience and bids our foolish appetites return 
heavenward. The moral nature of Henryson deems 
that Chaucer had dealt too tenderly with the errors of 
passion, and in a pitiful and dolorous Testament of 
Cressid he shuts the door of mercy severely upon her. 
In Robin and Makyne, breaking through the tradition of 
solemn iambics for all subjects, Henryson bursts forth into 
a light lyrical measure of a charming pastoral gaiety. This 
ballad is the Scotch counterpart of the Niitbrow7i Maidy 
an excellent English pastoral ballad or lyrical eclogue of 
doubtful date. 

Henryson's principal feat was that of translating, or 
rather paraphrasing, j^sofs Fables into Scottish rime 
royal, ^sop had been printed in Latin in 1473, and in 
Greek in 1480; Caxton Englished the Fables from the 
French in 1483. It is believed that Henryson was in- 



48 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

dependent of English influences, and his version may 
date from about 1478. Of these fables a prologue and 
thirteen narratives are all that have come down to us, 
and this is much to be regretted, since in the realistic 
vigour of these stories Henryson is at his best. All are 
worth studying ; the hasty reader may be recommended 
particularly to ^' The Cock and the Jasp " and ^' The 
Uplands Mouse and the Burgess Mouse/' No greater 
compliment can be paid to the latter than is paid by M. 
Jusserand, who, although a Frenchman, prefers Henry- 
son's version to that of Lafontaine. In this agreeable 
dominie of Dunfermline, we first meet with the rustic 
vein, the homeliness in pastoral imagination, which has 
continued to be characteristic of Scotch literature, and 
which culminates in Burns. 

A poem of poignant beauty and pathos, the Lament for 
the Makers, written by Dunbar about 1507, reveals to us 
the fact that a whole school of reputable poets flourished 
in Scotland at the Courts of James III. and James IV. 
What we possess of the Scots poetry of that epoch is so 
excellent in kind that we may well mourn that the writ- 
ings of Sir Mungo Lockhart of the Lea, Quintin Shaw, 
"good gentle" Stobo, and the rest of them have com- 
pletely disappeared. Of the list of poets, apparently 
belonging to his own age or to the generation immediately 
preceding," "good Master" Walter Kennedy is the only 
one of whose work we have any substantial fragments. 
These present to us the idea that he was a link between 
Henryson and Dunbar, but inferior in merit to both of 
them. We gather, indeed, that Dunbar was recognised 
at once as the first poet of the age, and we may console 
ourselves by believing that in the ninety or a hundred 
poems of his which we are fortunate enough to possess, 



DUNBAR 49 

we hold the fine flower of Scotch Renaissance poetry. 
Dunbar, let it be plainly said, is the largest figure in 
English literature between Chaucer and Spenser, to each 
of whom, indeed, he seems to hold forth a hand. 

The life of William Dunbar is very imperfectly 
known to us. It is probable that he was born in 1460, 
and that he died soon after 1520. He was a Lothian 
man, educated at St. Andrews. After the murder of 
James III., in 1488, Dunbar seems to have passed over 
to France, as a secular priest, preaching his way through 
Picardy to Paris, where a great many young Scotch- 
men, some of them afterwards to be eminent, were then 
studying. He seems to have travelled widely, visiting even 
Holland, Spain, and Norway. In 1500 we find him back 
in Scotland, and attached for the remainder of his life to 
James IV. as Court poet, taking, among the many versifiers 
of the age, the predominant appellation of '' Rhymer of 
Scotland" or Poet Laureate. In this capacity he was pre- 
sent in London to negotiate the marriage of James IV. 
and Margaret Tudor, in 1502; for which ceremony 
Dunbar composed the most ambitious of his existing 
works. The Thistle and the Rose. In 1507 the art of print- 
ing was introduced into Scotland by Andrew Miller of 
Rouen, and among the earliest productions of the press 
was a collection of Dunbar's poems, including the 
Golden Targe and the Fly ting of Dunbar and Kennedy^ 
1508. He seems to have survived Flodden field in 1513, 
but the remainder of his life is very vague. 

Extreme richness and brightness of diction are the 
characteristic qualities of Dunbar's verse. He is the first 
to break up and cast behind him the monotonous con- 
ventions of mediaeval style. » His range is very wide, 
sweeping from solemn hymns and lyrics of a poignant 



50 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

melancholy to invectives and comic narratives of the 
broadest merriment. Without doubt he specially prided 
himself on his elaborate allegorical romances^ in which 
he gave free access to those 'Husty roses of rhetoric" 
with which he loved to adorn his verse. These allegories 
are of the old familiar French school, distinguished only 
by the extremely ornate and melodious verbiage of Dunbar. 
There is less courtliness and more nature in the comic 
lyrics of Dunbar, the sprightliness and vigour of which 
are clouded for modest readers by their remarkable free- 
dom of language. Fortunately the dark Northern dialect 
and the eccentricities of Dunbar's spelling are veils to 
hide our blushes. In the Testament of Andrew Kennedy j 
a humorous will in verse, the influence of Villon upon 
Dunbar has been perhaps a little hastily traced. The 
pictures which this poet gives of the Court life are 
curiously rough and coarse, heightened in colour, no 
doubt, by the poet's singular gift for satire. The vitu- 
perative verses of Dunbar, written apparently with the 
maximum of violence and of good temper, remind us of 
the tourneys of the Italian Humanists. They were merely 
exercises in abusive rhetoric indulged in among excellent 
friends. One of the best-known of Dunbar's poems, 
the Dance of the Seven Deadly SinSj is of the graver 
satirical class. S(«ne of his religious pieces are not only 
of a true sublimity, but display that lyrical element in 
him which was so new in British poetry of artifice. 

In reaching Dunbar we find that we have escaped 
from the dead air of the late Middle Ages. The poetry of 
this writer is defective in taste — rhetorical, over-ornate ; 
he delights to excess in such terms as ^' crystalHne," 
^'redolent," ^'aureate," and '^enamelling." He never 
escapes — and it is this which finally leads us to refuse the 



DUNBAR 51 

first rank to his gorgeous talent — from the artificial in 
language. He does not display any considerable intel- 
lectual power. But when all this is admitted, the activity 
and versatility of Dunbar, his splendid use of melody 
and colour, his remarkable skill in the invention of varied 
and often intensely lyrical metres, his fund of animal 
spirits, combine to make his figure not merely an ex- 
ceedingly attractive one in itself, but as refreshing as a 
well of water after the dry desert of the fifteenth century 
in England. It is a matter for deep regret that the early 
verse of this great writer is lost, one fears beyond all hope 
of its recovery. The analogy of Dunbar with Burns is 
very striking, and has often been pointed out ; but the 
difference is at least that between a jewel and a flower, 
the metallic hardness of Dunbar being a characteristic 
of his style which is utterly out of harmony with the 
living sensitiveness of his greater successor. This metal 
surface, however, is sometimes burnished to a splendour 
that few poets have ever excelled ; for intricate and almost 
inaccessible elaboration of rhyme-effects, Dunbar's Ballad 
to Our Lady is one of the most extraordinary feats in the 
language. 

The consideration of the Scotch poets of the Renais- 
sance has, however, carried us a little way beyond their 
English contemporaries. In poetry there was nothing 
that could compete for a moment, not merely with 
Dunbar, but with the lesser writers of his school ; but 
in prose there took place, about 1470, a very remarkable 
revival, analogous to the sudden development of poetry 
just one hundred years earlier. At the extinction of the 
Lancastrian dynasty, modern English prose, hitherto a 
mere babbling of loose incoherent clauses, began to take 
form and substance. It is evident from various indica- 



52 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tions that the awkwardness and deadness of Enghsh 
prose had struck many persons of influence at the 
Yorkist Court. Caxton tells us of the anxiety which 
the King's sister, Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, felt for 
the cultivation of a pure English. One of the first who 
attempted to reform the use of the vernacular was the aged 
Lancastrian Lord Chancellor, Sir John Fortescue, who, 
having written pregnantly and abundantly in Latin, began, 
when he was probably approaching eighty years of age, 
to compose in English, and produced, in 147 1, a Declara- 
tion upon Certain Writings out of Scotland, a retractation 
of his Lancastrian arguments and an acknowledgment 
of Edward IV. A year or two later, it would seem, 
Fortescue wrote his more important treatise, the Difference 
between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy. He deserves 
the praise of being our earliest pohtical historian. For- 
tescue is one of our greatest Latin authorities on consti- 
tutional law, and as a writer on definitely national themes 
in a purely colloquial English he is an innovator among 
those who wrote, if not in Latin or French, in a style 
obviously translated from one of those tongues. His 
sentences are short, but abrupt and inelegant ; he per- 
forms his task, and we acknowledge his courage, but we 
cannot pretend to enjoy the manner of delivery. 

The man, however, to whom English prose owes its 
popular vehicle is William Caxton, whose Recueil of the 
Histories of Troy, translated in 1471 from the French of 
Raoul Lefevre, was printed by his own hand at Cologne. 
In 1476 he brought his press over to Westminster, and 
began his career as the Aldus of England; the first-fruits 
of his printing-press being the Dictes of the Philosophers, 
1477, by the second Earl Rivers, who also deserves ''a 
singular laud and thanks" as one of the pioneers of 



MALORY 53 

our prose. Caxton, besides the immortal fame which he 
won as the introducer of printing into England, was a 
lucid and idiomatic writer, whose style may be observed 
in various translations, as well as in shorter and more 
original ^^ prologues" and '^epilogues." It is highly to 
Caxton's credit that he saw that English prose, in order 
to become an instrument worthy of the language, must 
be vitalised. What passed for Lancastrian prose had 
been dead, heavy, cold as a clod, and as opaque. Caxton, 
without any very great genius for writing, was at least 
vivid and amusing. When he excuses himself for scrib- 
bling, unauthorised, an epilogue to Lord Rivers's Dictes, 
saying that '^ peradventure the wind had blown over the 
leaf," Caxton introduces a playfulness, a lightness of touch 
that had been hitherto unknown in English prose. He 
was a man, not of genius, but of industry and taste, born 
at a fruitful moment. 

Not Fortescue, nor Rivers, nor Caxton, however, can 
compare with the writer who first achieved the feat of 
writing English prose that should have the charm of 
English verse. To the great name of Sir Thomas Mal- 
CORE or Malory it would scarcely be possible to pay too 
high an encomium. Unhappily, of his person we know 
absolutely nothing; he was "the servant of Jesu both 
day and night," and that shadow in the mist of piety is 
all we see of the immortal author of the Morte d^ Arthur. 
For two centuries past the legends of Arthur and his 
Table Round had permeated the English fancy ; verse 
romances, translated or imitated from the French, each 
engaged with some fragment or other of the vast myste- 
rious story, had been the popular reading of gentle and 
simple. Malory came forward, at the moment when 
English prose felt itself able at last to compete with 



54 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

verse, and presented to the new dynasty a compilation 
of the whole Arthurian cycle, selected and arranged with 
infinite art, and told in a style that was as completely 
novel as it was beautiful and effective, 

Much has been said of an English epic of Arthur, and 
Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Tennyson in turn essayed 
or approached it. Each of them was, or would have 
been, indebted to the old chronicle of Malory ; it is 
questionable if any of them has, or would have, excelled 
him. He came at the moment when the charm of these 
exquisite tales of chivalry was taking its sunset colours. 
No longer credulously believed, it was necessary that 
stories which were already beginning to be questioned, 
the real propriety of which was fading with the passage 
of those Middle Ages, of which they were the purest ex- 
pression, should be clarified of their coarsest improba- 
bilities, their wildest outrages upon credence, and that 
their appeals to sentiment, to beauty of idea, should be 
carefully gathered into a posy. In 1470 much was still 
believed that we reject, much still passed for gospel truth 
that we can hardly put up with in a fairy-tale. Men's 
minds were passing through a transition, from the child- 
like credulity of the Middle Ages to the adolescent igno- 
rance of the Renaissance. However much Malory might 
pare away, he might be trusted to preserve efiough to 
astonish a modern reader. 

To s.iy that Malory's style is better than that of any of 
his predecessors is inadequate, for, in the broad sense, 
he had no predecessors. EngHsh prose, as a vehicle for 
successive and carefully distinguished moods of romantic 
mystery, plaintive melancholy, anger, terror, the intoxi- 
cating fervour of battle, did not exist before he wrote the 
Moite d' Arthur. His sentences are short, but they have 



MALORY 5 5 

nothing of the dryness of Fortesc.ue's ; if he is languid, 
it is because he desires to produce the impression of 
languor, not, like Caxton, because he is inherently a light 
weight in literature. The effect which Malory has pro- 
duced on generations of English readers is greater than 
we are accustomed to realise. He tinges the whole Eng- 
lish character ; he is the primal fount of our passion for 
adventure, and of our love of active chivalry. The tales 
he tells are old ; the Britons, as William of Malmesbury 
tells us, had been raving about Arthur for centuries, when 
he felt it his duty to reprove them. Since then the beau- 
tiful, fantastic cycle had grown and grown, till it covered 
the whole imagination of Western Europe as with a dewy 
cobweb. But it was Malory, and not any Frenchman or 
Celt, who drew the bright lines together, and produced, 
out of such evanescent material, one of the great books 
of the w^orld. 

Under the House of York the art of wTiting English 
verses became almost extinct. John Kay, Edward IV.'s 
royal poet, paraphrased exclusively from Latin, and he 
was succeeded by Bernard Andre, who wrote in French. 
The work done by Langland and Chaucer threatened to 
be entirely undone, and English poetry was once more 
ready to submit to the tyranny of Continental Europe. 
With the accession of the Tudor dynasty a change for the 
better came in, and the reign of Henry VIL was illus- 
trated by certain writers, not of the first excellence, but 
yet deserving great praise for having taken up the tradition 
of English imaginative writing. Hawes, Barclay, and 
Skelton were almost exactly contemporaneous, and all 
three began to write after the visit of Dunbar to London, 
en the occasion of the marriage of James IV., in 1503. 
It is hardly fantastic to attribute to the example of the 



56 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

highly lettered and poetic Court of Scotland the sudden 
revival of English verse after more than half a century of 
total obscuration. In nothing else, however, do Skelton, 
Barclay, and Hawes, three very distinct types, resemble 
one another. 

A very interesting Hnk between Lydgate and Spenser 
is formed by Stephen Hawes. The only w^ork of his 
which demands our notice is the long allegory of the 
Pastime of Pleasure J \w six thousand verses of rime royal, 
finished about the year 1506, and printed three years 
later by Wynkyn de Worde. This poem is of pecuHar 
interest as being an elaborately artificial attempt to re- 
suscitate the mediaeval romance of allegorical chivalry, 
which was by that date entirely out of fashion. Stephen 
Hawes, wdth calm disdain for modern Tudor taste, goes 
.back to the mode of tw^o hundred years earlier, and in- 
vents a poem in the manner of Jean de Meung. The 
speaker of this piece is called Grande Amour, and he 
walks distractedly in a glorious valley full of flowers, till 
at moonrise he finds himself at the foot of a copper 
image, and lies down there to sleep. The lady Fame 
appears to him, attended by her greyhounds, Governance 
and Grace, and tells him that far aw^ay, in the magical town 
of Music, lives La Belle Pucelle, but that the way to this 
castle perilous is defended by giants. She leaves him, 
and he wanders on until he sees the turrets and battle- 
ments of the fortress of Moral Document. He slays 
giants, storms the castle, and after serving apprentice- 
ships with the ladies Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, he 
pushes on to the city of Music and finds La Belle Pucelle. 
Their meeting in the garden is prettily described; but 
many things get mixed together, and the poem, now half 
ended, loses all coherence. The hero vanquishes many 



SKELTON 57 

giants and releases many ladies with his sword Clara 
Prudence ; then marries, grows old and dies, while Time 
and Eternity compose his epitaph. 

" For though the day'e, be 7iever so long, 
At last the bells ringeth to evensong^'' 

is the only couplet commonly remembered of this languid 
and artificial poem, affected and tedious to a degree, and 
yet strangely permeated with the sense of romantic 
beauty. Hawes was an extravagant admirer of Lydgate, 
whose prosodical heresies affect his measure unfavour- 
ably. 

Alexander Barclay, who, although '^born beyond 
the cold river of Tweed," used the Southern dialect, and 
wrote at Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire, did useful if 
somewhat humble work by paraphrasing in English 
several of the Latin eclogues of ^neas Sylvius and of 
Mantuan, and Brandt's huge Suabian satire of the Nar- 
renschiff or Ship of Fools. But Barclay was a dull and 
clumsy versifier, and far more interest attaches to the 
strange experiments in metre of his " rascal " rival, John 
Skelton. In 1489 this curious person was created Poet 
Laureate at the University of Oxford, and in 1493 made 
laureate to the King at Cambridge, being habited for 
the occasion in a green and white dress, with a wreath 
of laurel, and the word Calliope embroidered in golden 
letters of silk on his gown. From the earliest infancy of 
the Duke of York (afterwards Henry VIII.) Skelton was 
his tutor, and Erasmus called him the decus et lumen of 
British letters. He has the reputation of disgusting 
ribaldry, but when he chooses to be sober, Skelton is 
delicately ornate to affectation. His great claim to our 
notice is that he was the first to break up the monotony 

5 



58 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of English verse. His Chaplet of Laurel is a piece of 
laborious allegory which Hawes might have signed^ but 
the real talent of Skelton lies in his wild and breathless 
short-line poems, half romance, half burlesque, of which 
Philip Sparroiv is the tvpe. The Chaplet of Laiwel itself 
is broken by odd, frenzied lyrics, one of which is the 
famous 

" Merry Margaret^ 

As midsummer flower^ 

Gentle as falcoii^ 

Or haivk of the tower P 

This rattling verse lent itself to the poet's fierce diatribes 
against Wolsey, who drove his tormentor at last into 
sanctuary in Westminster Abbey for the remainder of 
his life. There are amazing passages in Colin Clout and 
the Tu7ining of Elinour Rumming \<:\\\Qh go far to justify 
Pope's unkind epithet of ''beastly Skelton." Warton 
has aptly described this poet's versification as '' anoma- 
lous and motley," but it w^as a pow^erful solvent of the 
stiff, tight, traditional metre of the fifteenth century. 

By this time the brief summer-time of the Renaissance 
in Scotland had been brought to a sudden close at 
Flodden, but in the meanwhile much had been pro- 
duced in the w^ild and coarse, but highly intelligent 
Court of James IV. which it would doubtless greatly 
interest us to read. But in Scotland there w^as a far 
slighter chance of the preservation of a literary product 
than in the south of England, and even the introduc- 
tion of the printing-press did not suffice to ensure survival 
to the mass of Scotch poetry, whose authors are to us 
nothing now but names. Probably we possess the 
best of all in Dunbar, w^hose brilliant viriHty and splen- 
dour of fancy are not repeated in Gavin Douglas, the 



GAVIN DOUGLAS 59 

famous Bishop of Dunkeld, whose gifts the Scottish critics 
have been inclined a Httle to overrate. His is, however, 
a picturesque personahty ; a son of Archibald '^ Bell the 
Cat/' Earl of Angus, educated at St. Andrews and Paris, 
identified with all the stormiest intrigues of his age, the 
poetical bishop appeals to the fancy as the hero of a stir- 
ring romance. But his original poems, his laborious 
allegories the Palace of Honour and King Hearty are of a 
kind now familiar and even wearisome to us in our 
descent of the Middle Ages, and in the gorgeousness of 
his verbiage Douglas only repeats, without surpassing, 
Dunbar. His fancy, however, inflamed by the reading 
of the classics, adopts humanist forms, and his picture of 
Love, no infant genius, but a man with square limbs, 
clad in green, like a hunter, is no mediaeval deity. 

After the disaster of Flodden in 15 13, the part taken by 
Douglas became a very prominent one. In these distract- 
ing times he had turned to the classics, and was translating 
Ovid to comfort himself. His famous version of the ^neid 
belongs to 1512-13. Under James V. his fortunes rose : 
he was made Abbot of Aberbrothock and Bishop of Dun- 
keld, and for many years '^ all the Court was ruled by the 
Earl of Angus and Mr. Gawain Douglas, but not v/ell." 
How he fought for the Archbishopric of St. Andrews, 
and how his turbulent ambition overreached itself ; how 
he fled to Wolsey, and died of the plague in Lord Dacre's 
house in London in 1522, are parts of the romance of 
Hterary history. His Virgil is written in heroic couplets, 
w^th " prologues " in stanzaic form prefixed to the books ; 
these prologues have been praised for the graceful studies 
of conventionalised natural objects which they present. 
But Gavin Douglas is most interesting as a writer in 
whom v.-e can watch the change from the mediaeval to 



60 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the humanist attitude in the act of abruptly taking 
place. 

It is not necessary to dwell at any length on the work 
of Sir David Lyndesay, James V.'s Lyon King-of-arms, in 
whom the brilliant school of Scotch Renaissance poetry 
closes. Lyndesay's interests and instincts were not artistic, 
and it is plain that he wrote in verse mainly because it 
was the only convenient weapon to his hand. He con- 
tinued to compose allegories in the outworn taste of his 
predecessors, but even this insipid form concealed a re- 
forming enthusiasm for current politics and the spleen of 
a practical satirist. He attacked ecclesiastical corruption, 
and v/as a supporter of Knox, in rough language and 
with a terrible fluency lashing all the sins and follies of 
his age. The rapid reader, whom the bulk of Lyndesay's 
works might alarm, may discover what manner of man 
and what manner of poet he was by reading the Testa- 
ment and Complaint of the PapingOy or dying parrot. 

The reign of Henry VIII. is illustrious in the history of 
literature for the progress which it encouraged in English 
prose. Verse made little mark in the early years of the 
reign ; but the King himself was solicitous about the 
improvement and free use of prose, and was aided in his 
designs by men of competent genius. In particular, the 
violent constitutional changes which had marked the 
fifteenth century naturally called for a school of his- 
torians. It is true that the art of political history, so long 
held in the traditional grasp of the chronicler, was not to 
be learned in a day. The critic of the progress of litera- 
ture observes with extreme interest the change which is 
introduced by the perception by English writers of the 
genius and mission of Froissart. The early Tudor his- 
torians, of whom Edward Hall and Robert Fabian are the 



LORD BERNERS 6i 

most notable, show, in their consciousness of the fact that 
the authorities do not always agree, a glimmering of the 
historic instinct. But they are dull and credulous. To 
Fabian the placing of a -new weather-cock on the steeple 
of St. Paul's or the tale of dishes at a city feast is a 
momentous matter. Hall, who begins to tell a story 
better than Fabian, often loses the point of it in some 
silly detail. Both, as it has been observed, improve as 
they reach a later date. 

It is difEcult to understand why, in an age so con- 
stantly in relation with France, it should have taken more 
than a century for the genius and influence of Froissart 
to have made themselves felt in England. A historian so 
cognisant of English affairs should, one would suppose, 
naturally attract English readers, but it is evident that, 
after the independent reformation of the English lan- 
guage in the fourteenth century, the knowledge of French 
rapidly went out of fashion, John Bourchier, Lord 
Berners, was Governor of Calais when, about 1520, 
Henry VI I L desired him to perform that translation of 
the Croniques which was printed by Pynson in 1523; and 
although Berners was already an elderly man, and had 
not, so far as we know, enjoyed any practice in literature, 
his native talent was such, and his mind so accurately 
tuned to that of Froissart, that the translation he pro- 
duced marked an epoch in the writing of English history, 
and was a notable addition to the still rare monuments of 
harmonious prose. 

Of scarcely less importance was the work to which the 
same translator next turned, the rendering into fluent and 
picturesque prose of the romance of Huon de Bordeaux^ 
the great popularity of which settled for English readers 
the form of much of the elfin chivalry, even by that time 



62 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

no longer credible or possible, but highly stimulating 
to the imagination, which still moves a childish fancy ; 
and in the pages of Berners's Huon, the fairy monarch, 
Oberon, first stepped on the shores of England. 

A deepening of the sense of religion and a quicker 
intellectual life, such as the incidents of Henry VIII.'s 
reign tended to encourage, left their direct mark upon 
literature in England. Men like Linacre and Colet re- 
turned from Italy. Men like Erasmus came to us, with 
their hearts and brains inflamed with new ideas, and it 
was the lads who listened at their feet who were to be the 
pioneers of thought in the coming age of reform. These 
humanists, unfortunately, in their desire for Catholic 
sympathy, trusted too much to Latin, and not enough to 
the vernacular It is to be regretted that Sir Thomas 
More, the greatest humanist, perhaps the greatest in- 
tellect of his time, gave so much to Europe that was 
meant for England. His masterpiece, the Uiopiay was 
not pubhshed by himself, but in his excellent Life of 
Richard IIL we see reflected on English history, for the 
first time, the pure light that Berners had so happily 
borrowed from Froissart. Hallam has, however, gone 
too far, both positively and relatively, in calling this 
^' the first example of good English language." The 
same writer has described More's Richard IIL as "the 
first book I have read through without detecting any 
remnant of obsolete forms." It is difficult to compre- 
hend what Hallam meant by ^^ obsolete," for More 
employs the phraseology of his own time not less 
freely than, for instance. Bishop Fisher does in his 
sermons. It is right, however, to recognise in More an 
easy, fluid grace which had been very rare before him, 
and is frequent in his writings. 



THE BIBLE 63 

But More is not more lucid or simple than his arch- 
adversary, William Tyndale, to whom we owe the in- 
estimable gift of an English New Testament in 1526/ 
followed in 1535 by an entire Bibky in which Miles 
Coverdale co-operated. In fact, it is dangerous to use 
comparative terms of praise and blame to these masters of 
early Tudor prose. The language was rapidly developing, 
and they moved with it. They shared its shortcomings 
and its advantages ; they were carried onward in the 
rush of its advance. But the introduction into every 
English household of the Bible^ translated into prose 
of this fluid, vivid period, is, after all, by far the ,most 
important literary fact of the reign of Henry VIII. It 
coloured the entire complexion of subsequent English 
prose, and set up a kind of typical harmony in the 
construction and arrangement of sentences. 

It would be an error, however, to exaggerate the 
general condition of prose in Tudor times. It had 
thrown off a large proportion of the stiffness and dul- 
ness of mediaeval language, and it had learned from 
Malory, Berners, and More the art of rising on occasion 
to pathetic, and even splendid eloquence. The work of 
Coverdale and Cranmer, appealing as it did to the 
million, rendered the arrangement of English thoughts 
in fine English language a not unfamiliar feat. We owe 
much to the theological writers of the middle of the 
sixteenth century, and to none more than to the com- 
mittee of divines who, under Cranmer's guidance, gave 

^ It is important to notice that Tyndale's translation of the New Testament 
was quite independent both of Wyclifife and of Wycliffe's original, the Vulgate. 
Lrasmus had by this time printed the Greek text, and it was directly from that 
source — although unquestionably with constant reference to Luther's German 
version of 1522 — that Tyndale performed his work. 



64 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

us, in 1549, the exquisite adaptation of homilies and 
collects called the Book of Common Prayer, It is remark- 
able, however, that translation is still predominant, and 
that the mannerism of the foreign author and the genius 
of his language still impresses itself upon the English 
translator. Harmonious as Cranmer is, he becomes 
homely, and even rough, when he leaves the liturgical 
diction which he borrowed from the Latin of the Catholic 
Church. The straightforward colloquial wit of Latimer 
is often very inspiring, and we thrill to-day at Foxe's 
plain and poignant stories, but neither in Foxe nor in 
Latimer do we find what is truly called style. 

At an age when most was borrowed, and all was 
experimental, it was very curious to see how the con- 
dition of English prose struck our earliest academic 
critic, Thomas Wilson, in his Art of Rhetoric, 1553. 
He speaks of the English of the time in other terms than 
those which we, looking forward and backward, are now 
inclined to use ; but he asserts certain laws which it is 
easy for us to see were those which most of the Tudor 
wTiters of that age, men as unlike as Cavendish and 
Ascham, Bale and Leland, were unanimous in following. 
Writers, according to Wilson, ought '^to speak as is 
commonly received," and who does that more than 
Latimer ? They are not ^' to seek to be overfine, nor yet 
overcaroless," and we are reminded of the wholesome, 
elegant roughness of the Toxophilus (1545). '^To speak 
plainly and nakedly after the common sort of men in 
few words " is the motto of this simple critic, and in no 
work of that or any age is this ideal more bluntly lived 
up to than it is in George Cavendish's breezy and 
familiar Life of Wolsey, But, again, Wilson speaks of 
some who " seek so far for outlandish English that they 



THE COURT OF LOVE 65 

forget altogether their mother's language," and we are 
reminded of the lay translators, who were not always or 
often so reserved, or so comparatively chastened, in their 
vocabulary as was Sir Thomas North in his version of 
Amyot's Plutarch. 

The Art of Rhetoric tells us that there was already an 
affectation of archaism — ^^the fine courtier will talk 
nothing but Chaucer." He notes, too, the pedantry of 
the Humanists, so crammed with classical allusion and 
quotation ^^that the simple can but wonder at their talk"; 
the fashion for tasteless neologisms, for the constant 
"planting of some awkward ^' inkhorn term," not one out 
of a score of which was destined to strike root and live, 
even for a generation. All these are faults and follies, 
and Wilson critically derides them. We can trace them 
one by one in the minor authors of the age. But these 
eccentricities, these affectations, if we will, displayed an 
almost feverish preoccupation with the art of writing. 
Success might not often crown the effort, but the effort 
is made ; we are far already from that deadness of the 
fifteenth century, when the chronicler tells his dreary 
sentences, mumbling and dropping them like the beads 
of an old conventional rosary. By 1550 the language 
has become highly vitalised, and although we cannot yet 
say that any great ease has been gained in the manoeu- 
vring of sentences, though grand thoughts are enve- 
loped still in cumbrous phrases, and the measure is 
still monotonous and rough, the road is being busily 
made which will presently lead us up to Hooker and 
to Bacon. 

When Wilson spoke, however, of the '^ line courtiers 
who will talk nothing but Chaucer," was he not rather 
thinking of that very striking archaistic poem, the Court 



66 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of LovCy which was actually attributed to Chaucer himself 
in the edition of 1561 ? This poem has been the theme 
of much discussion. It was probably not written earlier 
than 1540, and it is unintelligible, unless we regard it as 
a deliberate and purely imitative attempt to resuscitate 
the mediaeval romance in a humanistic age. With the 
earlier poems formerly attributed to Chaucer we can see 
that the anonymous authors intended no fraud, but that 
the excellence of their accidental productions led sub- 
sequent editors, in their laxity, to fasten to the car of the 
greatest mediaeval poet everything which seemed to them 
fairly worthy to share in his triumph. But this explana- 
tion does not cover the Court of Love y a mock-antique of 
nearly fifteen hundred Hues, the versification and language 
of which instantly bewray it to a philologist as certainly 
later than the Middle Ages. It seems plain that in this 
remarkable poem we have a conscious literary exercise, 
almost a forgery, from the hand of a very clever poet, 
who was a student of James I. and of Lydgate as well as 
of Chaucer. 

Who this poet was we can at present offer no conjec- 
ture. '' Philogenet, of Cambridge, Clerk," is the author, 
but under this pseudonym he has remained undetected 
by modern criticism. The imitation of the Chaucerian 
manner is close, but the writer has an ease and a melodious 
flow of versification denied to Hawes or Barclay, so far 
as we can judge by their existing works ; and, in spite 
of its intentional archaism, the Court of Love reads as 
though it was written a generation later than the Pastime 
of Pleasure. It contains a considerable number of words 
of the ''aureate" class, otherwise mainly used by the poets 
of the Northern dialect, and I have elsewhere suggested 
that it is the work of a Scotch poet deliberately writing 



TOTTEL'S MISCELLANY 67 

in the English tongue. The author begs that '• metricians" 
will excuse his little skill, but the curious point is that in 
respect of metre he is far more accomplished than any 
other poet of the first half of the sixteenth century, with 
the doubtful exception of Skelton. We must look at the 
Court of Love as a literary exercise, not without analogy 
to the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites, in w^hich a modern 
artist, rebelling against the tendencies of his own age, 
resolutely returns to discarded ideals and obsolete forms 
of art. Another such exercise, of still later date, is the 
Scotch poem of the Court of Venus ^ by Rolland. With 
these puzzling compositions the schools of mediaeval 
poetry in Great Britain definitely close. 

Simultaneously with this archaistic revival, which was 
of no real importance, there was a movement in the op- 
posite direction which was of a revolutionary character, 
and which led directly to the adoption of new and final 
rules in English prosody. The historic evidences of this 
highly important movement are, unhappily, lost to us. 
We can hardly reconstruct, even by conjecture, w^hat 
were the ties which bound together the group of briUiant 
young poets whose work, most of it posthumous, was 
published by Tottel in his well - known miscellany of 
Songs and Sonnets in 1557. ^^ know that Sir THOMAS 
Wyatt the elder, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, 
were the leaders of the school. Sir Francis Bryan was 
another member, but we know not which were his con- 
tributions. All these were dead when the volume of 
1557 was, as is supposed, edited by Nicholas Grimald, 
who inserted many of his own poems. Lord Vaux was 
another of the '^uncertain authors," and so, it is believed, 
w^ere John Heyw^ood, Barnabee Googe, and Churchyard, 
who, alone of the whole group, survived until the age 



68 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of Shakespeare. It is evident that all these men could 
hardly be considered contemporaries, and the verse col- 
lected by Tottel must have been composed at various 
times within the space of some thirty years. It repre- 
sents, no doubt, a selection of the poems produced by 
poets of widely-different habits and degree, but all in the 
new manner, in defiance of mediaeval tradition. 

Among these new poets the earliest are the greatest. 
The merit of Surrey and Wyatt so far surpasses that of 
their successors that they have, to some excess, mono- 
polised the credit of innovation. Wyatt, born in 1503, 
was much the oldest of the group ; he was an active 
diplomatist and traveller, and evidently a man whose 
mind was peculiarly open to foreign influences. He 
died in 1542. As to the Earl of Surrey, in spite of his 
high lineage, his eminence as a writer, and the romantic 
incidents of his life and death, we are singularly ignorant 
of the facts of his earlier career. He was perhaps born 
in 1516; he was certainly executed on Tower Hill, in 
circumstances of bewildering obscurity, in January 1547. 
Tradition declares that, like Wyatt, but in more fantastic 
conditions, Surrey visited Italy in his youth. In the 
legends of a later generation the poet was represented 
as conducted by Cornelius Agrippa through the mazes 
of necromancy, and shown his Geraldine in a magic 
mirror. All this, and more, is valuable only as proving 
the hold which the romantic idea of Surrey had taken on 
the popular mind. Wyatt is understood to have nursed a 
hopeless passion for Queen Anne Bullen, whose brother 
George was one of the group of new poets. The whole 
movement seems inspired by an uneasy amorous chivalry, 
seeking modern forms for its expression. 

In this our tantalising ignorance of the events which 



SURREY 69 

led to the composition of the poems, we are driven to an 
examination of the poems themselves. This, at first sight, 
seems to help us little, since they are strung together 
without any revelation of chronological order. Those of 
Wyatt, Surrey, and Grimald are, however, by great good 
fortune, distinguished from the anonymous mass, and 
as we examine these more closely, certain indications 
become plainly visible. In the volume of 1557, the 
earliest verses are those of Surrey, and they claim 
this pre-eminence from their excellent value. Surrey 
was, without question, the most flexible talent in the 
group, and in all probability the one who pointed out 
the road to the others. It is certain that he was pre- 
cocious, and he may have been writing as early as 1536, 
that is to say, six years before the death of Wyatt. There 
seems evident in the majority of Wyatt's poems a timidity 
which contrasts with the boldness of Surrey, and, although 
it must be confessed that the dates present us with great 
difficulties, we have the impression that Surrey was the 
master-spirit, as he was certainly the purer and liner 
poet. It is not desirable, however, to distinguish too 
closely between those two great harbingers of modern 
lyrical poetry. Wyatt seems to have borrowed most 
from France, Surrey most from Italy, and the latter was 
at that moment the more fruitful source of inspiration. 

It was noted by the editor of 1557 that the whole 
group of new poets excelled in the art of writing ^^in 
small parcels." By this he meant in short lyrics, as 
contrasted with the lumbering and pompous forms of 
mediaeval poetry. We are prepared to find the new 
writers eager to adopt from Continental literature such 
metres and types as should be most useful to them in 
carrying out this design, and accordingly we find the 



'JO MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

contributions of Surrey opening with an essay in terza 
riniay the earHest in the language. To Wyatt and to 
Surrey conjointly is due the honour of having intro- 
duced the sonnet from Italy, and, what was to be of 
less importance, the rondeau from France. It is not 
impossible that the sonnet also may have come to Wyatt 
from France, and not directly from Italy, since these 
were the days of MeUin de St. Gelais and of Clement 
Marot. In another publication, issued a fortnight after 
the Miscellany^ Tottel printed some translations of Virgil 
done by Surrey into blank verse. The adoption of this 
metre shows the quickness and deUcacy of Surrey's taste, 
for it was but very recently invented in Italy, and the 
Sofinisba of Trissino (15 15) was the only work in which it 
had attained any prominence. Surrey, whose instinct 
for prosody was phenomenal, must have met with this 
play^ or possibly with Sannazaro's timid essay in the 
Arcadia^ and at once transplanted blank verse from a 
soil in which it would never flourish, to one in which it 
would take root and spread in full luxuriance. 

It is to Surrey and Wyatt, then, that we owe the direc- 
tion our modern lyric poetry has taken. Their songs 
and sonnets are of a Petrarchan character ; they begin, 
in English, that analysis of the malady of love, that im- 
pulsive, singing note of emotion, which has since enriched 
our literature with some of the loveliest lyrics in the 
w^orld. Their own work was not, in comparison with 
what presently succeeded it, of the highest excellence. 
They were forerunners, progenitors — they prophesied 
of better things. Their elegies are easy and flowing, 
their songs graceful, their sonnets (especially Surrey's) 
remarkable for the daring with which real scenes and 
persons are introduced into the impassioned descant. 



GRIMALD 71 

Wyatt is sometimes a little weighed down by remnants 
of the mediaeval vocabulary and movement^ and his ear 
is singularly uncertain ; but when he pours out such a 
strain of tender song as ^' Forget not yet," and we com- 
pare this with anything that had preceded it in English 
of the sam^e class, we have to acknowledge his extreme 
sensitiveness to valuable exotic models. In this high 
service to poetry, Grimald (who was possibly an Italian by 
birth — Niccolo Grimaldi) took a part which has scarcely 
received due attention. He was two or three years 
younger than Surrey, and he wrote, at his best, with 
more smoothness of melody than either of the elder 
friends. His lyric beginning ''What sweet relief" was 
not equalled again until the Elizabethan age, and Grimald 
was particularly happy in the use of a rhym^ed couplet 
of alternately twelve and fourteen syllables, which was 
intended, perhaps, to represent the French alexandrine. 
This curious measure, which was not Grimald's invention, 
became excessively popular during the next half-centur}^, 
sank into doggerel jingle, was cast out with miockery, and 
has never been used since 1600. Such are the whimsical 
fates of metrical innovations, for the sonnet and blank 
verse, which long seemed to have sunken into oblivion 
under the popularity of this twelve-fourteen measure, 
only waited until its brief day had closed to rise into 
honoured and permanent use. 

The period between 1530 and 1545 probably includes 
all that was of primary importance in this first renaissance 
of English poetry. What strikes us in it pre-eminently 
is its complete emancipation from the mediaeval tradi- 
tions which had bound all previous writers of verse. It 
was the earliest British recognition of the new laws which 
European lyric had made for itself, but it was essentially 



72 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

a premature recognition of it. The accentuation of Eng- 
lish was still uncertain, although a comparison of the 
iambic line of Wyatt and of Surrey suggests that a marked 
solidification of metre took place after 1535. Neither of 
these poets was great ; skilful, elegant, eminently enlight- 
ened and unattached, they lacked the force of thought 
and richness of imagination which might have stamped 
their innovations on popular practice. So that the school 
of Wyatt and Surrey remains something isolated and 
ineffectual, breaking with a posy of delicate flowers and 
a few graceful playthings the great empty space which 
divides the mediaeval from the Elizabethan age. It is 
not, however, in any way correct to say that Wyatt and 
Surrey were '^ precursors " of the latter. If they pro- 
phesied of anything, it was of a graceful age of humanistic 
and Petrarchan poetry, gentle, smooth, and voluble, such 
as came to France, but was excluded from England by a 
forcible evolution of national spirit in a quite different 
direction. 



Ill 

THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 

1560-1610 

The accession ot Queen Elizabeth, in 1558, was imme- 
diately followed by such a quickening of the political, 
social, and religious life of England as makes a veritable 
epoch in history. In literature, too, we are in the habit of 
regarding the development and range of those '^ spacious" 
times as having been extraordinary. Ultimately, indeed, 
nothing that the world has seen has been more extra- 
ordinary, but this expansion of the national temperament 
did not by any means reach the sphere of letters at once. 
For the first twenty years of the Queen's reign English 
literature was apparently stationary in its character, un- 
adorned by masterpieces, and oblivious of distinction in 
style. If we look more closely, however, we may see 
that these years, inactive although they seem, were years 
of valuable preparation, education, and whetting of the 
national appetite. 

The sentiment of the early Tudors, in all things con- 
nected with the mind, had been narrow and opposed to 
the movements of Continental thought. But Elizabeth, 
although her vehement Protestantism might seem to cut 
her off from European sympathy, was in reality much 
more drawn to its intellectual manifestations than her 
predecessors had been. It would be more to the point. 



74 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

perhaps, to say that her subjects were drawn into the 
general Hfe of the world more than theirs had been. 
Everywhere new emotions, a new order of thought, were 
abroad, and what had passed over Italy long before, and 
had seized France half a century earlier, now invaded 
England. With the death of Mary, the bondage of the 
Middle Ages was finally broken through ; a rebellion 
against the ascetic life was successful ; a reaction against 
exclusive attention to religious ideas set in, almost with 
violence, among men of a literary habit of mind. Cal- 
vinism, a new phase of the ascetic instinct, made a foot- 
ing in England, but it advanced slowly, and allowed 
literature time to develop by the side of it. In short, 
there obtained, from wider knowledge of the material 
world, from slackening theological torment, from a larger 
commerce with mankind, a reassertion of human nature, a 
new pleasure in the contemplation of its joys, its passions, 
its physical constitution. It is to this altered outlook 
upon life and man that we owe the glories of Elizabethan 
literature. 

But these glories were not able to display themselves 
at once. In the tradition of English writing, especially 
of English verse, everything was still primitive and feeble, 
uncertain and inconsistent. The lyrics of Wyatt and 
Surrey had given a suggestion of a path which poetry 
might take, but a pretty copy of verses here and there 
flashing in the midst of a sea of jingling prose, did not 
show that even the gentle lesson of Tottel's Miscellany 
had been practically learned. We have but to compare 
what was written in England in 1560 with the slightly 
earlier hterature of Italy, or even of France, to see that 
this country still languished in a kind of barbarism. To 
contrast the madrigals and epigrams of Marot, which it 



TRANSLATIONS 75 

is perfectly fair to compare with work of the same class 
produced by the early Elizabethans, is to draw a parallel 
between the product of an accomplished and in his way 
perfectly modern master, and the stumblings of ignorant 
scholars, who, eager to learn, yet know not what they 
should be learning. 

The best that can be said, indeed, of the early Eliza- 
bethans is, that they were conscious of their deficiencies, 
and that they spared no pains in groping after self-educa- 
tion. They avoided no labour which might help them 
to improve the English language, to make its vocabulary 
rich enough and its syntax supple enough for the designs 
they had before them. But it is very strange for us to 
observe how little their vigour was aided by intelligence 
or their activity by sureness of touch. Humanism came 
upon the nation, but in forms curiously foreign to the 
rest of Europe ; it came in an almost infantine curiosity 
to become acquainted with the ideas of the ancient 
classics, without taking any trouble to reproduce the 
purity of their style or to preserve the integrity of their 
language. England was flooded with ^' translations " in 
prose and verse ; it has become the fashion of late to 
find surprising merits in the former, but no one has yet 
been bold enough to champion the latter. Lovers of 
paradox may hold that Adhngton (1566) is a picturesque 
writer on lines dimly suggested by Apuleius, or that 
Heliodorus is sufficiently recognisable in the 'Svitty and 
pleasant" pages of Underdowne (1569). But in dealing 
with verse we are on firmer ground, and it may safely be 
cisserted that viler trash, less representative of the original, 
less distinguished in language, less intelligent in intention, 
is not to be found in the literature of the world, than in 
the feeble, vague, and silly verse-translations from the 



ye MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

classics which deformed the eadier years of EHzabeth's 
reign. Phaer (1558) would be the worst of all translators 
of Virgil were he not surpassed in that bad eminence 
by the maniac Stanyhurst (1582). As for the group of 
gentlemen who put Seneca into rhyme — the Newtons 
and Nevilles and Studleys and Nuces — they, in their own 
w^ords, ^'linked lie, with jingling chains, on wailing Limbo 
shore/' the complete mockery of every stray reader who 
comes across them. Arthur Golding, who paraphrased 
the Metamorphoses oi Ovid (1565-67), was the best of this 
large class of verse-translators of the early part of the 
reign ; he possessed no genius, indeed, but a certain 
limpidity and sweetness in narrative lifts him out of 
the ^Mimbo" of the Jasper Heywoods and the Church- 
yards. 

This labour of translating occupied a vast number of 
persons at the Universities and the Inns of Court, where, 
as Vv'C are told in 1559, '^Minerva's men and finest w^its 
do swarm." Much, possibly the majority of what was 
WTitten, never reached the printing-press at all. More 
interesting, perhaps, but scarcely more meritorious than 
the work of the translators, were the attempts at original 
or imitative poetry. The earliest name is that of Bar- 
nabee Googe, whose most important poem, the Cupido 
Conquered J shows, like the Temple de Cupido of Marot (the 
comparison is cruel for Googe), a tendency to return to 
mediaeval forms of allegory, and to the school of the 
Roman de la Rose. George Turbervile, a translator from 
Mantuan and Boccaccio, wrote so-called '^ songs and 
sonnets" (1567) of his own. The Romeus aiid Juliet of 
Arthur Broke has the interest of having certainly been 
enjoyed by Shakespeare. These and other minor poets 
of this experimental period were greatly hampered by 



SACKVILLE 77 

their devotion to the 'tiresome couplet of alternate six 
and seven beats, a measure witliout a rival in its capacity 
for producing an effect at once childish and pedantic. 
But it is in the frequent and popular miscellanies of this 
age, and particularly in the Pa7'adise of Dainty Devises 
(1576) and the Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventiojts 
(1578), that the triviality and emptiness of early Eliza- 
bethan verse-style may be most conveniently studied. 
Poetry was in eager request during these years, but the 
performance was not ready to begin ; the orchestra was 
tuning up. 

One musician, indeed, there was who produced for a 
very short time a harmony which was both powerful and 
novel. The solitary poet of a high order between Dunbar 
and Spenser is Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord 
Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset. Born in 1536, he went 
early to Oxford, and becam.e locally celebrated for 
'' sonnets sweetly sauced," vdiich have entirely disap- 
peared ; we may conjecture that they w^ere of the school 
of Wyatt. In 1561 there was played at Whitehall the 
'^ great mask'"' or tragedy of GorbnduCj by Sackville and 
his friend Norton. Finally, the second or 1563 edition 
of the narrative miscellany called A Mirror for Magis- 
/r<^/^i- contained two contributions, an 'Mnduction" and 
a story of '* Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham," from 
the pen of Sackville : it is supposed that these were 
written about 1560. In the latest of these compositions 
the poet, addressing himself by name, says that it was 
his purpose ^^ the woeful fall of princes to describe " in 
future poems ; but this he was prevented from doing by 
his absorption in political and public life. He rose to 
the highest offices in the state, living on until 1608, but 
is not known to have written another line of verse. 



78 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Sackville's poetical life, therefore, closed at about the 
same age as Keats's did ; he is among '' the inheritors of 
unfulfilled renown." His withdrawal from the practice 
of his art probably delayed the development of English 
literature by a quarter of a century, since of Sackville's 
potentiality of genius there can be no question. What 
he has left to us has a sombre magnificence, a stately ful- 
ness, absolutely without parallel in his own age. The 
poetlings around him were timid, crude, experimental, 
but Sackville writes like a young and inexperienced 
master perhaps, yet always like a master. He shows 
little or not at all the influence of Wyatt and Surrey, but 
with one hand he takes hold of the easy richness of 
Chaucer and with the other of the majesty of Dante, to 
whose Inferno the plan of his I//diictio?i is deeply indebted. 
In his turn, Sackville exercised no slight fascination over 
the richer, more elaborate and florid, but radically cog- 
nate fancy of Spenser ; and even Shakespeare must have 
read and admired the sinister fragments of the Lord 
High Treasurer. Scarce an adjective here and there 
survives to show Sackville faintly touched by the taste- 
less heresies of his age. His poetry is not read, partly 
because of its monotony, partly because the subject- 
matter of it offers no present entertainment ; but in the 
history of the evolution of style in our literature the 
place of Sackville must always be a prominent one. 

It is to be noted, as a sign of the unhealthy condition 
of letters in this hectic age, that although it produced 
experiments in literature, it encouraged no literary men ; 
that is to say, the interest in books was so faint and un- 
settled, that no one man was persuaded to give his Hfe 
to the best literature, or any considerable portion of his 
life. The only exception may seem to be that of George 



ASCHAM 79 

Gascoigne, whose talent needed but to have equalled 
his ambition to reach the highest things. Unfortunately, 
his skill was mediocre, and though he introduced from 
Italy the prose comedy, the novel, and blank verse satire, 
and was the first translator of Greek tragedy and the 
earliest English critic — success in any one of which de- 
partments might have immortalised him — he was tame 
and trilling in them all. He was still writing actively 
when, in 1577, ^^ ^^^^ prematurely, at the age of forty. 
Nash, in the next generation, summed up the best that 
can be said for Gascoigne in describing him as one 
'Svho first beat the path to that perfection which our 
best poets have aspired to since his departure." 

What has been said of the verse of the early Eliza- 
bethan period is in some measure true of its prose, with 
the exception that bad taste and positive error were less 
rampant because there was much less ambition to be 
brilliant and less curiosity in experiment. The prose of 
this period is not to be sharply distinguished from that 
of the earlier half of the century. It presents to us no 
name of a creator of style, like Cranmer, and no narrator 
with the vivacity of Cavendish. Roger Ascham, who 
survived until 1568, was the leading writer of the age in 
English ; his influence was strenuously opposed to the 
introduction of those French and Itahan forces which 
would have softened and mellowed the harshness of the 
English tongue so beneficially, and he was all in favour 
of a crabbed imitation of Greek models, the true beauty 
of which, it is safe to say, no one in his day compre- 
hended in the modern spirit. It is impossible to call 
Ascham an agreeable writer, and pure pedantry to insist 
upon his mastery of English. His efforts were all in an 
academic direction, and his suspicion of ornament was 



8o MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in diametric opposition to the instinct of the nation, as 
to be presently and in the great age abundantly revealed. 
Meanwhile to Ascham and his disciples the only thing 
needful seemed to be '^ to speak plainly and nakedly aftrr 
the common sort of men in few words." North sacri- 
ficed, indeed, ail distinction, but secured a merry species 
of vigour, in his paraphrase of Amyot's translation of 
Plutarch. A deserved popularity was won by Day's 
1563 translation of the Latin of Foxe's so-called Book of 
Martyrs and by Holinshed's familiar ChronicleSy of which 
Shakespeare made abundant use. In a sketch less hur- 
ried than this must be, the laborious compilations of 
Grafton and of Stow would demand an attention which 
we dare not give to them here. All these compositions 
were of value, but the progress of English prose is not 
apparent in any of them. 

On no point of literary criticism have opinions differed 
more than as to the place of John Lyly in the develop- 
ment of style. Extravagantly admired at the time of its 
original publication, ridiculed and forgotten for two cen- 
turies, the Euphues (1579-80) has recovered prestige only 
to have its claims to originality contested. It has been 
elaborately shown that Lyly owed his manner and sys- 
tem to the Spaniard Guevara, and his use of Enghsh to 
Lord Berners, while the very balance of his sentences 
has been attributed to imitation of the Prayer-Book. In 
all this there seems to me to be too much attention paid 
to detail ; looking broadly at the early prose of Eliza- 
beth's reign, it is surely impossible not to recognise th:it 
a new element of richness, of ornament, of harmony, an 
element by no means w^holly admirable, but extremely 
noticeable, was introduced by Lyly ; that, in short, the 
publication of Euphues burnishes and suddenly animates 



LYLY 8 1 

■ — with false lights and glisterings, if you wiil^ but still 
animates — the humdrum aspect of English prose as 
Ascham and Wilson had left it. Splendour was to be one 
of the principal attributes of the Ehzabethan age, and 
Euphues is the earliest prose book which shows any 
desire to be splendid. 

It is a very tedious reading for us, this solemn romance 
of a young Athenian of the writer's own day, who visits 
Naples first and then England. But to the early ad- 
mirers of EuphueSf its analysis of emotion, its wire-drawn 
definitions of feeling, its high sententiousness, made it 
intensely attractive. Above all, it was a book for ladies ; 
in an age severely academic and virile, this author turned 
to address women, lingeringly, lovingly, and he was re- 
w^arded as Richardson was two centuries later, and as ^l. 
Paul Bourget has been in our own day. Of the faults of 
EupJmes enough and to spare is said in all compilations 
of criticism. Lyly's use of antithesis is always severelv 
reproved, yet it broke up successfully the flat-footed dul- 
ness of his predecessors ; his method of drawing images 
from fabulous zoology and botany is ridiculed, and de- 
ser\'edly, for it degenerates into a trick ; yet it evidences a 
lively fancy ; his whole matter is sometimes styled '' a 
piece of affectation and nonsense," yet that merely proves 
the critic to have never given close attention to the book 
he condemns. The way Lyly says things is constantly 
strained and sometimes absurd, but his substance is 
always noble, enlightened, and urbane, and his influence 
was unquestionably as civilising as it was extensive. As 
to his Euphuism, about which so much has been writ- 
ten, it was mainly a tub to catch a whale, — a surprising' 
manner consciously employed to attract attention, like 
Carlylese. It had no lasting effects, fortunately, but for 



82 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the time it certainly enlivened the languid triviality of 
the vernacular. 

Of infinitely greater importance was the revolution 
effected in poetry, in the same eventful year 1579, by 
the publication of the ShepJiercTs Calender of Edmund 
Spenser. With this book we begin a new era ; we 
stand on tlie threshold, not of a fashion or a period, 
but of the whole system of modern English poetry. 
The strange obscurity which broods over most of 
Elizabethan biography — where the poetry was every- 
thing and the poet little regarded — lifts but seldom 
from the life of Spenser. He may have been born 
in 1552 ; some translations of his from Petrarch and 
Joachim du Bellay, already showing the direction of his 
reading, were printed in 1569 ; from 1570 to 1576 he 
was at Cambridge, where he fell into a literary, but ex- 
tremely tasteless and pedantic set of men, who, neverthe- 
less, had the wit to perceive their friend's transcendent 
genius ; and during three obscure years, while we lose 
sight of him, we gather that he was bewitched by the 
charming form and character of Sir Philip Sidney, his 
junior by two years. The influence of Sidney was not 
beneficial to Spenser, for that delightful person had 
accepted the heresy of the Cambridge wits, and was 
striving to bring about the '' general surceasing and 
silence of bald rhymers," and the adoption in English 
of classic forms of rhymeless quantitative verse, entirely 
foreign to the genius of our prosody. 

For a moment it seemed as though Spenser would 
succumb to the authority of Sidney's Areopagus, and 
waste his time and art on exercises in iambic trimeter. 
But at the end of 1579 came the anonymous publication 
of the Shepherd's Calender ^ and in the burst of applause 



SPENSER S3 

which greeted these lyric pastorals, the clanger passed. 
The book consisted of twelve eclogues, distantly modelled 
on those of Theocritus, and more closely upon Virgil 
and Mantuan ; they were in rhymed measures of extreme 
variety, some of the old jingling kind, from which Spenser 
had not yet escaped, others of a brilliant novelty, con- 
veying such a music as had yet been heard from no 
English hps. ''June" is the most stately and imagina- 
tive of these eclogues, while in '' May " and ^' September" 
we see how much the poet was still enslaved by the evil 
traditions of the century. The Shepherds Calender is 
momentous in its ease and fluent melody, its novelty of 
form, and its delicate grace. Throughout England, with 
singular unanimity, '' the new poet " was hailed with 
acclamation, for, as Sidney quaintly put it two years 
later, ''an over-faint quietness" had ''strewn the house for 
poets," and the whole nation was eager for song. Yet 
we must remember that the positive value of these arti- 
ficial pastorals of 1579 might easily be, and sometimes 
has been, overrated. 

Spenser now disappears from our sight again. We 
divine him employed in the public service in Ireland, 
associated there with Raleigh, and rewarded by the manor 
and castle of Kilcolman. We get vague glimpses of the 
composition, from 1580 onwards, of a great poem of 
chivalry, in which Spenser is encouraged by Raleigh, and 
in 1590 there are published the first three books of the 
Faerie Queen. From this time forth to the end of his 
brief life, Spenser is unchallenged as the greatest of the 
English poets, no less pre-eminent in non-dramatic verse 
among his glorious coevals than Shakespeare was pre- 
sently to be in dramatic. He published in 1591 his 
ComplaintSy a collection of earlier poems ; Colin Clout's 



84 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Come Home Again in 1595, Amo7^etti and Epithalamia in 
the same year, three more books of the Faerie Queen and 
the Four Hymns in 1596, The close of his life was made 
wretched by the excesses of the Irish rebels, who- burned 
Kilcolman in October 1598. Spenser, reduced to penury, 
fled to England, and died " for lack of bread " in London, 
on the i6th of January 1599. 

It is by the Faerie Queen that Spenser holds his sove- 
reign place among the foremost English poets. Taken 
without relation to its time, it is a miracle of sustained 
and extended beauty ; but considered historically, it is 
nothing less than a portent. To find an example of 
British poetry of the highest class, Spenser had to search 
back to the Middle Ages, to Chaucer himself. So great 
was the change which two centuries had made in lan- 
guage, in prosody, in attitude to life, that Spenser could 
practically borrow from Chaucer little or nothing but a 
sentimental stimulus. The true precursors of his great 
poem were the Italian romances, and chiefly the Orlando 
Furioso. It is not to be questioned that the youth of 
Spenser had been utterly enthralled by the tranquil and 
harmonious imagination of Ariosto. In writing the chival- 
rous romance of the Faerie Queen, Spenser, although he 
boasted of his classical acquirements, was singularly little 
affected by Greek, or even Latin ideas. There was no 
more of Achilles than of Roland in his conception of a 
fighting hero. The greatest of all English poems of 
romantic adventure is steeped in the peculiar enchant- 
ment of the Celts. It often seems little more or less than 
a mabinogi extended and embroidered, a Celtic dream 
tempered with moral allegory and political allusion. Not 
in vain had Spenser for so many years inhabited that 
"most beautiful and sweet country," the Island of Dreams 



SPENSER 85 

and melancholy fantasy. Cradled in the richness of 
Italy, trained in the mistiness of Ireland, the genius of 
Spenser was enabled to give to English poetry exactly 
the qualities it most required. Into fields made stony 
and dusty with systematic pedantry it poured a warm 
and fertilising rain of romance. 

The first three books of the Faerie Queen contain the 
most purely poetical series of pictures which English 
literature has to offer to us. Here the Italian influence 
is still preponderant ; in the later books the Celtic spirit 
of dream carries the poet a little too far into the realms 
of indefinite fancy. A certain grandeur which sustains 
the three great cantos of Truth, Temperance, and Chastity 
fades away as we proceed. It would be, indeed, not 
difficult to find fault with much in the conduct of this 
extraordinary poem. The construction of it is loose and 
incoherent when we compare it with the epic grandeur 
of the masterpieces of Ariosto and Tasso. The heroine. 
Queen Gloriana, never once makes her appearance in 
her own poem, and this is absurd. That a wind of 
strange hurry and excitability seems to blow the poet 
along so fast that he has no time to consider his grammar, 
his rhymes, or even his continuity of ideas, but is obliged, 
if the profanity be permitted, to " faggot his fancies as 
they fall" — this is certainly no merit ; while the constant 
flattery of Elizabeth has been to some fastidious spirits 
a stumbling-block. 

But these are spots in the sun. The rich and volup- 
tuous colour, the magical landscape, the marvellous 
melody, have fascinated young readers in every genera- 
tion, and will charm the race till it decays. More than 
any other writer, save Keats, Spenser is interpenetrated 
with the passion of beauty. All things noble and comely 



S6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

appeal to him ; no English poet has been so easy and 
yet so stately, so magnificent and yet so plaintive. He 
is pre-eminent for a virile sweetness^ for the love and 
worship of woman, for a power of sustaining an im- 
pression of high spectacular splendour. What should 
constitute a gentleman, and in what a world a gentleman 
should breathe and move — these are his primary con- 
siderations. His long poem streams on with the panoply 
of a gorgeous masque, drawn through the resonant 
woodlands of fairyland, in all the majestic pomp of 
imitative knight-errantry. And then his music, his in- 
comparable harmony of versification, the subtlety of 
that creation of his, the stanza which so proudly bears 
his name — the finest single invention in metre w^hich 
can be traced home to any English poet ! All these 
things combine to make the flower of Edmund Spenser's 
genius not the strongest nor the most brilliant, perhaps, 
but certainly the most dehcately perfumed in the whole 
rich garden of English verse. 

The splendid achievement of Spenser saved our litera- 
ture once and for all from, a very serious danger. Ascham, 
whose authority with the university wits of the succeeding 
generation was potent, had deliberately stigmatised rhyme 
as barbarous. This notion exercised many minds, and 
was taken up very seriously by that charming paladin of 
the art. Sir Philip Sidney. His experiments may be 
glanced at in the pages of the Arcadia, and they were 
widely imitated. They followed, but were of the same 
order as the stilted Seneca tragedies, to w^hich we shall pre- 
sently refer, and, like them, were violently in opposition 
to the natural instinct of English poetry. Spenser would 
now have none of these '^ reformed verses," and in one 
of his early pieces, ''The Oak and the Briar/' went far to 



SIDNEY ^7 

vindicate by his practice a freedom of prosody which was 
not to be accepted until the days of Coleridge and Scott. 
Of the works of Sidney himself, it is difficult to know 
how far they influenced taste to any wide degree, for 
they were mainly posthumous. To the Astrophel a7id 
Stella we shall presently return. The Arcadia — that 
"vain, amatorious poem," as Milton calls it, a heavy 
pastoral romance in poetical prose and prosy verse, 
founded on the lighter and more classical Arcadia of 
Sannazaro — though written perhaps in 1580, just after 
the publication of Eiiphues, was not printed until 1590. 
The most valuable work of Sidney, who purposed no 
monument of books to the world, was the Defense of 
Poesy^ an urbane and eloquent essay, which labours 
under but one disadvantage, namely, that when it was 
composed in 1581 there was scarcely any poesy in 
England to be defended. This was posthumously printed 

ii^ 1595- 

There was, however, one department in poetry of 

superlative importance, in which neither Spenser nor 
even Sidney took a prominent part. It is strange that 
the former, with all his accomplishments in verse, left 
the pure spontaneous lyric, the /xeXo?, untouched ; the 
latter, essaying it on pedantic lines and in a perverse 
temper, produced the grotesque experiments embedded 
in the Arcadia^ the effect of which on subsequent litera- 
ture was wholly evil. Neither of these great men gave 
due recognition to a new thing, quite unknown in the 
English of their own early youth, which revolutionised 
the speech and style of the nation, and which has done 
more than anything else to stamp on subsequent English 
poetry its national character. This was the Song, as in- 
troduced, almost simultaneously, and as by an unconscious 



88 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

impulse, by a myriad writers in the last decade but one 
of the sixteenth century. The successes of English verse 
had hitherto been of a stately kind ; the forms used had 
scarcely ever been at all felicitous if they strayed from 
the rigid mediaeval stanzas and rhythms. Lyric had 
awakened in Italy and then in France without encourag- 
ing even its direct imitators in England, such as Surrey 
and Wyatt, to any but a timid elegance. It may be 
broadly said that, until 1580, the only examples of lyric 
in English had been fragments or offshoots of rude 
folk-song. 

The change of note is one of the most extraordinary 
and the least accountable phenomena in the history of 
literature. Quite abruptly, we find a hundred poets able 
to warble and dance where not one could break into a 
tune or a trot a year or two before. It is difficult to 
assign priority or aii exact date in this matter. If Sidney 
wrote — 

" Weep^ neighbours^ iveep, do you 7tot hear it said 
Thai Love is dead? " 

(which was not printed until 1598) as early as some critics 
suppose, he does, in spite of his pedantries, deserve a 
place among the precursors. We are more sure of Lyly, 
whose 

'"'' Cupid and my Campaspe piafd''^ 

was in print in 1584, Among'the anthologies, the earliest 
in which the true song-note is faintly heard is Clement 
Robinson's Ha?zdful of Pleasant Delights, also of 1584. 
The claim of Constable is now known to rest upon a 
misprint, and the date of Campion's first songs, which, 
in 1601, had so passed from hand to hand that they had 



ELIZABETHAN SONGS 89 

grown '^ as coin cracked in exchange/' is uncertain. An 
examination of Greene's romances, in which poetry of all 
kinds was included, shows a sudden alteration, a brisk 
exchange of the old dull trudge for brilliant measures 
and lively fancy about the year 1588, and in 1589 Lodge 
abruptly throws aside his cumbersome pedestrian style. 
Without falling into a dogmatic statement, these indica- 
tions will suffice to show when the reformation, or rather 
creation, of English song occurred. 

What caused it ? No doubt the general efflorescence 
of feeling, the new enlightenment, the new passion of 
life, took this mode of expressing itself, as it took others, 
in other departments of intellectual behaviour. But this 
particular manifestation of tuneful, flowery fancy seems 
to have been connected with two artistic tendencies, the 
one the cultivation of music, the other the study of recent 
French verse. The former is the more easy to follow. 
The year 1588 was the occasion of a sudden outburst of 
musical talent in this country ; it is, approximately, the 
date of public recognition of the exquisite talent of Tallis, 
Bird, and Dowland, and the foundation of their school 
of national lute-melody. This species of chamber-music 
instantly became the fashion, and remained so for at least 
some quarter of a century. It was necessary to find 
words for these airs, and the poems so employed were 
obliged to be lucid, liquid, brief, and of a temper suited 
to the gaiety and sadness of the instrument. The de- 
mand created the supply, and from having been heavy 
and dissonant to a painful degree, EngHsh lyrics suddenly 
took a perfect art and sweetness. What is very strange 
is that there was no transition. As soon as a composer 
wanted a trill of pure song, such as a blackcap or a 
whitethroat might have supplied, anonymous bards, 
7 



90 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

without the smallest trainings were able to gush forth 
with — 

" O Love, they wrong thee much 

That say thy sweet is bitter, 
When thy rich fruit is such 

As nothing can be sweeter. 
Fair house of joy and bliss, 
Where truest pleasun is, 

I do adore theej 
I know thee what thou art, 
I serve thee with my hea?'t, 

And fall before thee " 

(a little miracle which we owe to Mr. Bullen's researches) ; 
or, in a still lighter key, with — 

" Now is the jnonth of maying. 
When merry lads are playiiig. 

Each with his bonny lass. 

Upon the greeny grass ; 
The Spring, clad all i7i gladness. 
Doth laugh at Winter's sadness. 

And to the bagpipe's sound 

The nymphs tread out their ground^ 

This joyous semi-classical gusto in life, this ecstasy in 
physical beauty and frank pleasure, recalls the lyrical 
poetry of France in the beginning of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, and the influence of the Pleiade on the song- 
writers and sonneteers of the Elizabethan age is not 
questionable. It is, however, very difficult to trace this 
with exactitude. The spirit of Ronsard and of Reny 
Belleau, and something intangible of their very style, are 
discerned in Lodge and Greene, but it would be danger- 
ous to insist on this. A less important French writer, 
however, Philippe Desportes, enjoyed, as we know, a 
great popularity in Elizabethan England. Lodge says 
of him that he was ^^ ordinarily in every man's hands," 



ELIZABETHAN SONGS 91 

and direct paraphrases of the amatory and of the reli- 
gious verse of Desportes are frequent. 

The trick of this Hght and briUiant sensuous verse once 
learned, it took forms the most various and the most 
dehghtful. In the hands of the best poets it rapidly 
developed from an extreme naivete and artless jigging 
freedom to the fullest splendour of song. When Lodge, 
in 159O; could write — 

" Like to the clear in highest sphere^ 
Where all ifnperial beatcty shines^ 
Of self -same colour is her hair, 
Whether icnfolded or in twi?ies ; 

Heigh ho, fair Rosaline I 
Her eyes are sapphires set in snow, 
Refini7ig heaven by every wink ; 
The gods do fear whenas they glow. 
And I do tremble, when I think, 

Heigh ho, would she were mitie I " 

there was no technical lesson left for the English lyric to 
learn. But the old simplicity remained awhile side by 
side with this gorgeous and sonorous art, and to the 
combination we owe the songs of Shakespeare and Cam- 
pion, the delicate mysteries of England's Helicon, the 
marvellous short flights of verbal melody that star the 
music-books down to 1615 and even later. But then the 
flowers of English lyric began to wither, and the jewels 
took their place ; a harder, less lucid, less spontaneous 
method of song-writing succeeded. 

Meanwhile, in close connection with the creation of 
the Elizabethan lyric, the development of the sonnet had 
been progressing. It passed through a crisis in 1580, 
when Thomas Watson published his singularly success- 
ful HecatompatJiia, a volume of a hundred sonnets in a 
vicious form of sixteen Hues. In spite of the popularity of 



92 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

this overrated volume, the metrical heresy did not gain 
acceptance, and Watson himself, in a later collection, re- 
jected it. In 1580 and 1581 Sidney was writing sonnets 
in a shape not dangerously differing from the accepted 
Italian standards, but he also encouraged the composition 
of quatorzains, poems of fourteen lines ending in a rhymed 
couplet. Unfortunately, this spurious form became 
generally accepted in England, in defiance of all Conti- 
nental precedent. It received imperious sanction from 
the practice of Shakespeare and Spenser, and, in spite of 
efforts made by Donne and others, this false sonnet was 
in universal employment in England until the time of 
Milton. 

Perhaps in consequence of this radical error of con- 
struction, which is fatal to the character of the poem, 
the vast body of Elizabethan sonnets, of which more 
than a thousand examples survive, suffers from a mono- 
tony of style, from which even the gracious genius of 
Spenser was not entirely able to escape in his Amoretti, Of 
course, infinitely the most valuable of these sonnet- 
cycles — the only one, indeed, which still lives — is that 
in which Shakespeare has enshrined the mysteries of a 
Platonic passion of friendship, fervid and wayward to 
the frontier of inverted instinct, which has been and 
always will be the crux of commentators. Yet even here 
it is to be noted that when Shakespeare leaves the soli- 
tary relation which was moving him, at this certain 
moment, so vehemently, he loses his magic and his 
melody and falls into the same affected insipidity and 
monotony as the other sonneteers of the age. The 
Astrophel and Stella of Sidney, posthumously printed in 
1591, let loose this new fashion of amorosity upon the 
world, and the period during which the rage for cycles 



JOHiN HEYWOOD 93 

of quatorzains lasted may be defined as from 1592 to 
about 1598. 

All this time, a prodigious new birth had been making 
its appearance in English literature. A living drama was 
created, which, almost without a childhood, sprang into 
magnificent maturity. In the Middle Ages, the verna- 
cular mysteries had enjoyed their day of popularity in 
England as in other parts of Europe, and of these miracle 
plays we still possess four cycles. After fifteenth-century 
*' miracles" had come the sixteenth-century '^moralities" 
and *' moral interludes," which were the connecting 
link between the Mediaeval and the Renaissance stage. 
The latest of the inglorious mediaeval playwrights had 
been John Heywood, whose rollicking Inteidudes were 
probably acted between 1520 and 1540 ; after his time 
the " morality " was an acknowledged survival, no longer 
in sympathy with the needs of the age. Much has been 
written, and much is doubtless still to be discovered, with 
regard to English drama between the York Mfsteries d.nd 
Goi^buduCy but it lies outside the scope of our inquiry. 
These '^miracles" and ''merry plays" were almost en- 
tirely devoid of purely literary merit, and were mainly of 
service in preserving in England the habit of witnessing 
and enjoying pubUc performances on the stage. 

Between the decay of the moralities and the foundation 
of a genuine native drama, an attempt was made to intro- 
duce nito England a dramatic literature founded directly 
on the ancients, — on the comedy of Plautus and the 
tragedy of Seneca. This effort ultimately failed in this 
country as completely as it succeeded in France, but it must 
be remembered that it made a gallant struggle for exist- 
ence during thirty years. Of these pseudo-classical plays 
the earhest andmost remarkable is the farce of Ralrh Roister 



94 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Doister. This was written by the Head-master of Eton, Dr. 
Nicholas Udall, about 1551, and was, therefore, almost 
exactly contemporaneous with the opening of modern 
comedy in France, in the Eugene of Jodelle (1552). If 
these two plays are compared, their similarity of system is 
remarkable ; each depends on the exploitation of a single 
farcical incident, adapted from the classical form to local 
conditions, with a certain simple insistence on analysis 
of character. It is curious to examine these two almost 
childish farces, which have a good deal in common, and 
to reflect that from these apparently cognate seedlings 
there presently sprang trees so widely distinct as Shake- 
speare and Moliere. But it would perhaps be more cor- 
rect to say that the seedling of which Ralph Roister Doister 
was the cotyledon never really reached maturity at all, 
but withered incontinently away. Other Terentian or 
Plautan plays were Still's Gammer Gurton^s Needle (1566) 
and Gascoigne's prose version of Ariosto's Gli Suppositi 

(1561). 

We have already spoken of the rage for translating 
Seneca which invaded England at the beginning of 
Elizabeth's reign. The anti-romantic spirit of these 
tragedies, with its insistance on correctness and simpli- 
city of plot, was contemplated by the English nation as 
by the French, but while the latter accepted, the former 
rejected it. The Gorboduc of Sackville is mainly interest- 
ing as showing how the spirit of Seneca could harden 
into stone or plaster a romantic genius of the most 
ductile order. Thomas Hughes (1587) endeavoured to 
make a positive pastiche of Seneca in an Arthurian 
tragedy. Scholars and wits of the academic type per- 
sisted in trying to force this exotic and entirely unsym- 
pathetic product on unwilling English ears, and no less 



THE CREATION OF A DRAMA 95 

a poet than Samuel Daniel, in the full Shakespearean 
heyday, polished in the true Senecan manner a stately 
Cleopatra (1592) and a stiff Philotas. But the classical 
tradition, thus amply presented, was deliberately and 
finally rejected by English taste. 

We have now reached the most extraordinary event in 
the history of English literature — the sudden creation of 
a secular, poetic drama — in the exercise of which letters 
first became a profession in- this country, and in the 
course of the intensely rapid development of which the 
greatest writer of the world was naturally evolved. It is 
necessary to warn the general reader that the processes 
of this development are extremely obscure, and that 
almost all its early events are dated and correlated solely 
by the conjectures of successive commentators, who have 
to base their theories on atoms of fact or of still less solid 
report. The dates supplied by the ordinary books of 
reference are here exceedingly misleading, for the year 
may be that either of the first performance, or of the 
registration, or of the publication of each piece, and the 
first and last of these may be divided by many years. 
For instance, the extremely important tragedy of Dr. 
Faustus was not printed until 1601, but it was acted in 
1588 ; still more notably, several of Shakespeare's early 
plays were still in MS. six years after his death. We get 
our information from rudely kept and imperfect registers, 
or from the diary of a single manager. Yet it is believed 
that between 1580 and 1640 not fewer than two thou- 
sand distinct plays were acted in England, and of these 
more than five hundred are extant. Through this vast 
crowd of imperfect witnesses, often with scarcely a clue, 
the student of Elizabethan drama has to thread his path. 
The researches of several students, extremely valuable 



g6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and original as they are, suffer from the lack of a sense 
of the frail tenure of irrefutable fact on which their 
systems are built up. The discovery of a single journal 
kept from 1585 to 1600 might turn our dramatic histories 
to something like waste paper. It seems proper to point 
out that while no part of our inquiry is of a more romantic 
interest; none is more uncertain and conjectural in its 
detail. 

It appears, however, that the result of the experiments 
in farce and in Senecan melodrama, of which brief men- 
tion has been made above, was, at first, confined to the 
production of an abundance of rough and incoherent 
plays, often no more than a succession of unconnected 
scenes, addressed mainly to the eye. It is probable that 
we possess a highly favourable example of these inco- 
herent pieces in the Arraignment of Paris, by GEORGE 
Peele, in which a classical story is faintly treated, with 
occasional passages of extraordinary suavity of blank 
verse and grace of fancy. We retain, moreover, eight 
so-called court-comedies by Lyly, produced between 
1580 and 1590. These, mainly written in prose, are alle- 
gorical and doubtless political satires, not at all dramatic 
in character, although broken up into dialogue, and to 
be considered rather in connection with the Euphues 
than as plays. Lyly, notwithstanding, had his influence 
in the romanticising of the English stage. 

Out of the unpromising chaos of which these were the 
floating inlands which have preserved the most consist- 
ency, there unexpectedly sprang the solid group of 
important writers who immediately preceded Shake- 
speare, and were, in fact, our first real dramatists, the 
earliest to conceive of tragedy and comedy in their 
modern sense. During the plague of 1586 all theatres 



KYD , 97 

were closed, and it seems almost indubitable that 
when they reopened they were catered for by play- 
wrights to whom the idea of a new art had meanwhile 
presented itself, and who had discussed its methods in 
unison. Of these, some, like Kyd and Peele, had been 
writing at an earher time, in the old vague way ; others, 
principally Greene, Lodge, and the anonymous author 
of that brilliant domestic drama, Arden of Fever sham ^ in 
all probability now opened their dramatic career. In 
some vague way, the original leadership in the new 
fashion of writing seems attributable to Thomas Kyd, 
who had been a translator not merely of Seneca, but 
of the French Senecan, Garnier, and now saw the 
error of his theories. Kyd is a sort of English Lazare 
de Bai'f, the choragus who directed the new dramatists 
and led them off. His early plays have disappeared, 
and Kyd's archaic Spanish Tragedy ^ acted in 1587, shows 
him still in the trammels of pseudo-classicism. This 
fierce play, nevertheless, is pervaded by a wild wind of 
romantic frenzy which marks an epoch in English drama. 
In Peele's King David and Fair Bethsabey perhaps a year 
or two later, there is a surprising advance in melody and 
the manipulation of blank verse. 

Far more important, however, in every way, appears 
to have been the action of Robert Greene on drama. 
Here again, unfortunately, much is left to conjecture, 
since, while the novels of Greene have been largely pre- 
served, his plays have mainly disappeared. It has been 
taken for granted, but on what evidence it is hard to tell, 
that his early dramas, produced perhaps between 1583 
and 1586, were of the Senecan order, and that Greene 
was converted to the new tragical manner by Kyd, or 
even by Marlowe, who was several years his junior. 



98 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

This theory is founded upon the close resemblance to 
the style of Tamburlaine met with in the 07'lando and 
the Alphonsus of Greene ; but we cannot be assured that 
the phenomenon is not a converse one, and the result of 
Marlowe's improvement upon Greene's rough essays. It 
is the undoubted merit of the older writer, that, though 
he lacks vigour, concentration, and selection, he is more 
truly the forerunner of the romantic Shakespeare than 
any other of the school. In Greene, the new spirit of 
Renaissance sensuousness, so unbridled in Marlowe, is 
found to be restrained by those cool and exquisite moral 
motives, the elaboration of which is the crowning glory 
of Shakespeare. Faint and pale as Greene's historical 
plays must be confessed to be, they are the first speci- 
mens of native dramatic literature in which we see fore- 
shadowed the genius of the romantic English stage. If 
we turn to France again, where a moment ago we found 
Jodelle so near to our own Udall, we see that in one 
generation the two schools have flown apart, and that 
while Greene and Kyd are prophesying of Shakespeare 
with us, Grevin and Larivey have already taken a stride 
towards Moliere. 

By far the most brilliant personage in this pre-Shake- 
spearian school, however, was Christopher Marlowe. 
Born in the same year as Shakespeare, he showed much 
superior quickness of spirit, and was famous, nay, was dead, 
almost before the greater writer had developed individual 
character. Between 1587 and 1593 Marlowe was cer- 
tainly the most prominent living figure in English poetry, 
with the single exception of Spenser. Long obscured by 
prejudice against the ultra-romanticism of his style and 
the heterodoxy of his opinions, it may be that of late 
Marlowe has been celebrated with some exaggeration 



\ 



MARLOWE 99 

of eulogy. He has been spoken of as manifestly in the 
first order of poets, as of like rank with ^schylus, and 
greater than Corneille. That his genius, cut off in his 
thirtieth year by the hand of a murderer, had unfathom- 
able possibilities, is not to be denied. His treatment 
of blank verse, which, though he habitually uses it 
monotonously and deadly, he can at a moment's notice 
transform into a magnificent instrument of melody, 
amounts, in these exceptional instances, to a positive 
enchantment. He breaks loose from the prison of 
mediaeval convention in thought and style as no Eng- 
lishman had been able to do before him. He was an 
"alchemist of eloquence," as Xash called him, who had 
discovered several of the rarest secrets of magic in lit^a- 
ture. To a rare degree he exemplified the passion, the 
virility, the audacious, and, indeed, reckless intellectual 
courage of the new^ English spirit. His epic paraphrase 
of Hero a7id Lcaiider shows him as intelligently enamoured 
of plastic beauty as his tragedy of Edward JL proves him 
alive to the long-forgotten art of dramatic psychology. 

His was, indeed, a majestic imagination, and yet, judg- 
ing Marlowe by what we actually possess of his writings, 
we need to moderate the note of praise a little. By the 
side of what Shakespeare was immediately to present to 
us, the grandiloquence of Tamburlaine seems childish, 
the necromantic scenes of Faustus primitive and empty, 
the execution of the well-conceived /^zc; of Malta savage 
and melodramatic. Only in reaching Edward IL do we 
feel quite persuaded that Marlowe was not merely a poet 
of amazing fire of imagination and melody of verse, but 
also a consummate builder of plot and character. This 
drama is probably almost exactly of the same date as the 
Two Gentlemen of Verona ^ and was written at the same 



100 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

age. There can be no question that in 1593 the per- 
formance and even the promise of Marlowe were greater 
than that of Shakespeare, who seems to take a leap for- 
wards the moment that his formidable rival is removed. 
All that can be now said is that, had both poets died on 
the same day, it is certain that Marlowe would appear to 
us the greater genius of the two. He is spasmodic and 
imperfect, his felicities are flashes in a coarse and bom- 
bastic obscurity of style, his notions of construction are 
barbarously primitive ; yet he preserves the perennial 
charm of one who has been a pioneer, who has cried in 
the wilderness of literature. 

The old notion that William Shakespeare was an 
untaught genius, warbling his wood-notes wild, has long 
been discarded. We now perceive that he was ^*made" 
not less than '^born"; that, whether "born" or '^made," 
he was the creature of his time, and of a particular phase 
of his time, to such an extent that he seems to us not so 
much an Elizabethan poet as Elizabethan poetry itself. 
His very life, of which enough is known to make him 
personally more familiar to us than are most of his less 
illustrious compeers, is more typical than individual in 
its features. In Shakespeare an heroic epoch culminates; 
he is the commanding peak of a vast group of mountains. 
It is therefore vain to consider him as though he stood 
alone, a solitary portent in a plain. More than any other 
of the greatest poets of the world, he rises, by insensible 
degrees, on the shoulders and the hands of a crowd of 
precursors, yet so rapidly did this crowd collect that our 
eyes are scarcely quick enough to perceive the process. 
It is perhaps useful, in so very summary a sketch as this, 
to take the date of Marlowe's death, 1593, and start by 
seeing what Shakespeare had by that time done. 



SHAKESPEARE loi 

He was twenty-nine years of age. If he had come up 
from Stratford in 1586, he had been already seven years 
in London, but no mention of his name survives earher 
than Christmas 1593. He had pubHshed nothing, but 
was then preparing Venus and Adonis for the press. 
How had these seven years, then, during which Alarlowe 
had been so active and so prominent, been emplo^^ed 
by Shakespeare ? Unquestionably in learning the secret 
of his art and in practising his hand on every variety 
of exercise. It seems likely that he had becom.e an 
actor soon after his arrival in London, probably join- 
ing that leading company, '^the Lord Strange's men," 
when it was formed in 1589. Early in 1592 the Rose 
Theatre was opened on the Bankside, and Shakespeare 
continued, no doubt, to act there until the more commo- 
dious Globe could receive his colleagues and himself in 
1599. ^^^' Sidney Lee believes that as early as 1591 the 
actor began to be a dramatist. There is no evidence 
of great precocity on Shakespeare's part. What he 
abandoned early, he never learned to excel in ; as an 
example, it may be pointed out that he remains inferior 
both to Spenser and to Marlowe in the province of 
rhymed narrative. To the great business of his life, the 
composition of plays, he applied himself at first as an 
apprentice. There can be little question that all his 
early dramatic work consisted in the revising and com- 
pleting of sketches by older men. These older men 
would, no doubt, in the main be anonymous playwrights, 
whose works are now as extinct as their names. But 
Shakespeare would also imitate and recast the dramatic 
sketches of those poets of an older generation who 
had started the new comedy and the new tragedy in 
England. From Peele, from Greene, from Marlowe 



I02 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

most of all, he would borrow, and that without Stint or 
scruple, exactly what he needed to form the basis of 
his own composite and refulgent style. 

That criticism has been too pedagogic in attempting to 
fix what must, for lack of documentary evidence, be left 
uncertain in detail, need not prevent us from admitting 
that certain hypotheses about the early Shakespeare are, 
at least, highly probable. The struggle between rhyme 
and blank verse, gradually ending in the triumph of the 
latter, is certainly an indication of date not to be despised. 
That other hands than that of Shakespeare are to be 
traced in the plays attributed to his 3^outh must be 
allowed, without too blind a confidence in plausible con- 
jectures as to the authorship of the non-Shakespearian 
portions. By the light of what patient investigation has 
achieved, we find Shakespeare, by 1593, identified with 
five or six plays, three of which may be held to be, 
practically, his unaided and unsuggested work. Loves 
Labour Lost ^ the Comedy of Errors, and the Two Gentlemen 
of Ve7'ona. In these we particularly note the struggle 
still going on for mastery between rhyme and blank 
verse, and the general effect is one of brightness, grace, 
and prettiness ; the key of feeling is subdued, the deeper 
wells of human passion are left untroubled. Each of 
these plays — even the Two Gefitlemen, which suggested 
greater things — leaves an impression of sketchiness, of 
siightness, on the mind, when we compare it with later 
masterpieces. 

It is difficult not to be persuaded that in 1593 some- 
thing of critical import happened which revealed his own 
genius to Shakespeare. Marlowe died ; the jealousy of 
the surviving elder playwrights broke out angrily against 
the Joannes Factotum from Stratford; the play-houses 



SHAKESPEARE 103 

were closed on account of the plague ; it is just possible 
that Shakespeare went to Germany and Italy. Several 
of these causes^ perhaps, combined to intensify his intel- 
lectual vitality. His company, now under the patronage 
of Lord Hunsdon, set to work again early in 1594. 
Shakespeare printed Vejtus and Adonis, a romance of 
the vain pursuit of unwilling adolescent beauty. This 
was perhaps the period of the agony of the Sonnets; 
but Shakespeare soon left transitory and tentative things 
behind him, and prepared for that solemn and specta- 
cular energy on the results of which the world has 
been gazing in wonder ever since, that vigour which was 
to be exercised for eighteen years upon the consumma- 
tion of English poetry. Between 1593, when drama was 
still in its essence primitive, and the close of the century, 
Shakespeare gave his attention mainly to history-plays 
and to idyllic comedies, reaching in the latter the highest 
level which this species of drama has attained in any 
language ; Midsummer Nighfs Dream (1595) leading us 
on by romantic plays, each more exquisite than the last, 
to a positive culmination of blossoming fancy in the As 
You Like It, of 1599. 

With A IPs Well that Ends Well and Jtdius Ccesar a new 
departure may be traced. Shakespeare seems suddenly to 
take a more austere and caustic view of life, and expresses 
it in sinister romance, or, more triumphantly, in tragedy 
of the fullest and most penetrating order. In 1601 he 
took an old play of Hamlet, perhaps originally written 
by Kyd, and rewrote it, possibly not for the first time. 
This final revision has remained by far the most durably 
popular of Shakespeare's works upon the stage. He 
had now reached the very summits of his genius, and if we 
oblige ourselves to express an opinion as to the supreme 



104 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

moment in his career, the year 1605 presently offers us 
an approximate date. We stand on the colossal peak of 
King Lear, with Othello on our right hand and Macbeth 
on our left, the sublime masses of Elizabethan mountain 
country rolling on every side of us, yet plainly dominated 
by the extraordinary central cluster of aiguilles on which 
we have planted ourselves. This triple summit of the 
later tragedies of Shakespeare forms the Mount Everest 
of the poetry of the world. If Macbeth dates from 1606, 
there were still four years of splendid production left to 
the poet, work of recovered serenity, of infinite sweetness, 
variety, and enchantment, but, so far as concerns grasp 
of the huge elements of human life, a little less heroic 
than the almost supernatural group of tragedies which 
had culminated in King Lear. And then, probably in 
the spring of 161 1, the magician, fresh from the ringing 
melodies of A Wintei-s Tale and of the Tempesty with 
all his powers and graces fresh about him, breaks his 
staff, leaves his fragments for Fletcher to finish, and 
departs for Stratford and the oblivion of a civic life. 
After five years' silence — incomprehensible, fabulous 
silence in the very prime of affluent song — Shakespeare 
dies, only fifty-two years of age, in 1616. 

From 1593 to 1610, therefore, the volcanic forces of 
Elizabethan literature were pre - eminently at work. 
During these seventeen years Spenser was finishing the 
Faerie Queen ^ Bacon and Hooker were creating modern 
prose, Jon son was active, and Beaumont and Fletcher 
beginning to be prominent. These, to preserve our moun- 
tain simile, were majestic masses in the landscape, but the 
central cone, the truncation of which would reduce the 
structure to meanness, and would dwarf the entire scheme 
of English literature, was Shakespeare. Very briefly, we 



SHAKESPEARE 105 

may remind ourselves of what his work for the press 
in those years consisted. He pubHshed no dramatic 
work until 1597. The plays to which his name is, with 
more or less propriety, attached, are thirty -eight in 
number; of these, sixteen appeared in small quarto form 
during the poet's lifetime, and the title-pages of nine or 
ten of these '^ stolen and surreptitious " editions, origin- 
ally sold at sixpence each, bear his name. We have 
the phenomenon, therefore, of a bibliographical in- 
difference to posterity rare even in that comparatively 
unlettered age. It is curious to think that, if all Shake- 
speare's MSS. had been destroyed when he died, we 
should now possess no Macbeth and no Othello, no Twelfth 
Night and no As You Like It, In 1623 the piety of two 
humble friends, Heminge and Condell — whose names 
deserve to be carved on the forefront of the Temple of 
Fame — preserved for us the famous folio text. But the 
conditions under which that text was prepared from what 
are vaguely called Shakespeare's ^^ papers " must have 
been, and obviously were, highly uncritical. The folio 
contained neither Pericles nor the Two Noble Kinsnieiz, 
yet participation in these is plausibly claimed for 
Shakespeare. What other omissions were there, what 
intrusion of lines not genuinely his ? 

This question has occupied an army of investigators, 
whose elaborate and conflicting conjectures have not 
always been illuminated with common sense. More than 
a hundred years ago, one of the wittiest of our poets 
represented the indignant spirit of Shakespeare as assur- 
ing his emendators that it would be 

^^ Better to bottom tarts ajtd cheesecakes 7iice 
Than thus be patched ajid cobbled i7i 07ie's grave, ^^ 

and since that date whole libraries have been built over 
8 



io6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the complaining ghost. Within the last quarter of a 
century, systems by which to test the authenticity and 
the chronology of the plays have been produced with 
great confidence, metrical formulas which are to act as 
reagents and to identify the component parts of a given 
passage with scientific exactitude. Of these "verse- 
tests" and "pause-tests" no account can here be given. 
That the results of their employment have been curious 
and valuable shall not be denied ; but there is already 
manifest in the gravest criticism a reaction against excess 
of confidence in them. At one time it was supposed 
that the "end-stopt" criterium, for instance, might be 
dropped, like a chemical substance, on the page of Shake- 
speare, and would there immediately and finally deter- 
mine minute quantities of Peele or Kyd, that a fragment 
of Fletcher w^ould turn purple under it, or a greenish 
tinge betray a layer of Rowley. It is not thus that poetry 
is composed ; and this ultra-scientific theory showed a 
grotesque ignorance of the human pliability of art. 

Yet, although the mechanical artifice of this class of 
criticism carries with it its own refutation, it cannot but 
have been useful for the reader of Shakespeare that this 
species of alchemy should be apphed to his text. It has 
dispersed the old superstition that every word printed 
within the covers of the folio must certainly be Shake- 
speare's in the sense in which the entire text of Tennyson 
or of Victor Hugo belongs to those poets. We are now 
content to realise that much which is printed there was 
adapted, edited, or accepted by Shakespeare ; that he 
worked in his youth in the studios of others, and that in 
middle life younger men painted on his unfinished can- 
vases. But there must be drawn a distinction between 
Shakespeare's share in the general Elizabethan dramatisa- 



SHAKESPEARE 107 

tion of history, where anybody might lend a hand, and 
the creation of his own sharply individualised imagina- 
tive work. If the verse-tester com.es probing in Macbeth 
for bits of Webster, we send him packing about his busi- 
ness ; if he likes to analyse Henry VL he can do no harm, 
and may make some curious discoveries. With the re- 
velation of dramatic talent in England there had sprung 
up a desire to celebrate the dynastic glories of the country 
in a series of chronicle-plays. It is probable that every 
playwright of the period had a finger in this gallery of 
historical entablatures, and Shakespeare, too, a modest 
artisan, stood to serve his apprenticeship here before in 
Richard III. he proved that his independent brush could 
excel the brilliant master-worker j\Iarlowe in Marlowe's 
own approved style. He proceeded to have a chronicle 
in hand to the close of his career, but he preserved for 
this class of work the laxity of evolution and lack of 
dramatic design w^hich he had learned in his youth ; and 
thus, side by side with plays the prodigious harmony of 
which Shakespeare alone could have conceived or exe- 
cuted, we have an epical fragment, like Henry V., which 
is less a drama by one particular poet, than a fold of the 
vast dramatic tapestry woven to the glory of England by 
the combined poetic patriotism of the Elizabethans. Is 
the whole of what we read here implicit Shakespeare, 
or did another hand combine with his to decorate this 
portion of the gallery ? It is impossible to tell, and the 
reply, could it be given, would have no great critical 
value. Henry V, is not Othello. 

"One of the penalties of altitude is isolation, and in re- 
viewing rapidly the state of literary feeling in England in 
Elizabethan and Jacobean times, we gain the impression 
that the highest qualities of Shakespeare remained in- 



io8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

visible to his contemporaries. To them, unquestionably, 
he was a stepping-stone to the superior art of Jonson, to 
the more fluid and obvious graces of Beaumont and 
Fletcher. Of those whose inestimable privilege it was to 
meet Shakespeare day by day, we have no evidence that 
one perceived the supremacy of his genius. The case is 
rather curious, for it was not that anything austere or 
arrogant in himself or his work repelled recognition, or 
that those who gazed were blinded by excess of light. 
On the contrary, it seemed to his own friends that they 
appreciated his amiable, easy talent at its proper value ; 
he was ''gentle" Shakespeare to them, and they loved 
both the man and his poetry. But that he excelled them 
all at every point, as the oak excels the willow, this, had 
it been whispered at the Mermaid, would have aroused 
smiles of derision. The elements of Shakespeare's per- 
fection were too completely fused to attract vulgar wonder 
at any one point, and those intricate refinements of style 
and of character which now excite in us an almost 
superstitious amazement did not appeal to the rough 
and hasty Elizabethan hearer. In considering Shake- 
speare's position during his lifetime, moreover, it must 
not be forgotten that his works made no definite appeal 
to the reading class until after his death. The study of 
'' Shakespeare " as a book cannot date further back than 
1623. 

For another century the peak of the mountain was 
shrouded in mists, although its height was vaguely con- 
jectured. Dryden, our earliest modern critic, gradually' 
perceived Shakespeare's greatness, and proclaimed it in 
his Pi^efaces. Meanwhile, and on until a century after 
Shakespeare's death, this most glorious of English names 
had not penetrated across the Channel, and was abso- 



( 



SHAKESPEARE 109 

lutely unrecognised in France. Voltaire introduced 
Shakespeare to French readers in 173 1, and Hamlet 
was translated by Ducis in 1769. Here at home^ in the 
generations of Pope and Johnson, the magnitude of Shake- 
speare became gradually apparent to all English critics, 
and with Garrick his plays once more took the stage. 
Yet into all the honest admiration of the eighteenth 
century there entered a prosaic element ; the great- 
ness was felt, but vaguely and painfully. At the end of 
the age of Johnson a generation was born to whom, for 
the hrst time, Shakespeare spoke with clear accents. 
Coleridge and Hazlitt expounded him to a world so 
ready to accept him, that in regarding the great Revival 
of 1800 Shakespeare seems almost as completely a 
factor in it as Wordsworth himself. In the hands of 
such critics, for the first time, the fog cleared away 
from the majestic mountain, and showed to the gaze 
of the world its varied and harmonious splendour. 
That conception of Shakespeare, which is to-day uni- 
versal, we owe, in a very great measure, to the intuition 
of S. T. Coleridge. 

It was the poet-critics of one hundred years ago who 
made the discovery that Shakespeare was not an unac- 
countable warbler of irregular rustic music, but the 
greatest of the poetic artists of the world ; that in a cer- 
tain way he sums up and fulfils the qualities of national 
character, as Dante and Calderon, Moliere and Goethe 
do, but to a still higher and fuller degree. It was they 
who first made manifest to us that in the complex fulness 
of Shakespeare's force, its equal potency in passion and 
beauty and delicate sweetness, in tragic rage and idyllic 
laughter, in acrid subtlety and infantile simplicity, we 
have the broadest, the most substantial, the most elaborate 



no MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

specimen of poetical genius yet vouchsafed to mankind. 
Whatever there is in hfe is to be found in Shakespeare ; 
there rises the culminating expression of man's happiest 
faculty, the power of transfiguring his own adventures, 
instincts, and aspirations in the flushed light of memory, 
of giving to what has never existed a reality and a dura- 
bility greater than the gods can render to their own 
habitations. 

The deep study of Shakespeare is a disastrous pre- 
paration for appreciating his contemporaries. He rises 
out of all measurement with them by comparison, and 
we are tempted to repeat that unjust trope of Landor's 
in which he calls the other Elizabethan poets mushrooms 
growing round the foot of the Oak of Arden. They had, 
indeed, noble flashes of the creative light, but Shake- 
speare walks in the soft and steady glow of it. As he 
proceeds, without an effort, life results ; his central quali- 
ties are ceaseless motion, ceaseless growth. In him, too, 
characteristics are found fully formed which the rest of 
the world had at that time barely conceived. His liber- 
ality, his tender respect for women, his absence from 
prejudice, his sympathy for every peculiarity of human 
emotion — these are miraculous, but the vigour of his 
imagination explains the marvel. He sympathised be- 
cause he comprehended, and he comprehended because 
of the boundless range of his capacity. The quality in 
which Shakespeare is unique among the poets of the 
world, and that which alone explains the breadth, the 
unparalleled vivacity and coherency of the vast world of 
his imagination, is what Coleridge calls his ^^ omnipresent 
creativeness," his power of observing everything, of for- 
getting nothing, and of combining and reissuing impres- 
sions in complex and infinite variety. In this godlike 



BEN JONSON III 

gift not the most brilliant of his great contemporaries 
approached him. 

With the turn of the century a reaction against pure 
imagination began to make itself felt in England, and 
this movement found a perfect expositor in Ben Jonson. 
Born seven years later than Shakespeare, he worked, like 
his fellows, in Henslowe's manufactory of romantic drama, 
until, in consequence of running a rapier through a man 
in 1598, the fierce poetic bricklayer was forced to take 
up an independent position. The immediate result was 
the production of a comedy. Every Man in his Humour, 
in which a new thing was started in drama, the study of 
what Jonson called '^ recent humours or manners of men 
that went along with the times." In other words, in the 
midst of that luxurious romanticism which had cul- 
minated in Shakespeare, Ben Jonson set out to be what 
we now call a ''realist" or a ''naturalist." In doing 
this, he went back as rigidly as he could to the methods 
of Plautus, and fixed his "grave and consecrated eyes" 
on an academic scheme by which poetry was no longer 
to be a mere entertainment but a form of lofty mental 
gymnastic. Jonson called his solid and truculent pic- 
tures of the age "comic satires," and his intellectual 
arrogance combining with his contempt for those who 
differed from him, soon called down upon his proud and 
rugged head all the hostility of Parnassus. About the 
year 1600 Jonson's pugnaciousness had roused against 
him an opposition in which, perhaps, Shakespeare alone 
forbore to take a part. But Jonson was a formidable 
antagonist, and when he fought with a brother poet, he 
had a trick, in a double sense, of taking his pistol from 
him and beating him too. 

A persistent rumour, constantly refuted, will have it 



112 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

that Shakespeare was one of those whom Jonson hated. 
The most outspoken of misanthropes did not, we may be 
sure, call another man ''star of poets" and "soul of the 
age " without meaning what he said ; but there may have 
been a sense in which, while loving Shakespeare and 
admiring his work, Jonson disapproved of its tendency. 
It could hardly be otherwise. He delighted in an iron 
style, hammered and twisted ; he must have thought that 
Shakespeare's ''excellent phantasy, brave notions, and 
gentle expressions" had a flow too liquid and facile. 
Jonson, with his Latin paraphrases, his stiff academic 
procession of ideas, could but dislike the flights and 
frenzies of his far less learned but brisker and airier 
companion. And Jonson, be it remembered, had the 
age on his side. To see Julms Ccesar on the boards 
might be more amusing, but surely no seriously minded 
Jacobean could admit that it was so instructive as a per- 
formance of Sejanus or of Catiline^ which gave a chapter 
of good sound Roman history, without lyric flowers or 
ornaments of style, in hard blank verse. Even the 
ponderous comedies of Ben Jonson were put forth by 
him, and were accepted by his contemporaries, as very 
serious contributions to the highest culture. What other 
men called "plays" were "works" to Jonson, as the old 
joke had it. 

Solid and of lasting value as are the productions of 
Jonson, the decline begins to be observed in them. 
Even if we confine our attention to his two noblest 
plays — the Fox (1605) and the Alchemist (1610) — we 
cannot but admit that here, in the very heyday and 
glory of the English Renaissance, a fatal element is 
introduced. Charm, ecstasy, the free play of the emo- 
tions, the development of individual character — these are 



BEN JONSON 113 

no longer the sole solicitude of the poet, who begins to 
dogmatise and educate, to prefer types to persons and 
logic to passion. It is no wonder that Ben Jonson was 
so great a favourite wdth the writers of the Restoration, 
for he was their natural parent. With all their rules 
and unities, with all their stickling for pseud-Aristotelian 
correctness, they w^ere the intellectual descendants of 
that poet who, as Dryden said, ^Svas willing to give 
place to the classics in all things." For the next fifty 
years English poetry was divided between loyalty to 
Spenser and attraction to Ben Jonson, and every year 
the influence of the former dwindled while that of the 
latter increased. 

Not the less does Ben Jonson hold a splendid and 
durable place in our annals. His is the most vivid and 
picturesque personal figure of the times ; he is the most 
learned scholar, the most rigorous upholder of the dignity 
of letters, the most blustering soldier and insulting dueller 
in the literary arena ; while his personal characteristics, 
^' the mountain belly and the rocky face," the capacity for 
drawing young persons of talent around him and capti- 
vating them there, the volcanic alternations of fiery wit 
and smouldering, sullen arrogance, appeal irresistibly 
to the imagination, and make the ^'arch-poet'' live in 
history. But his works, greatly admired, are little read. 
They fail to hold any but a trained attention ; their 
sober majesty and massive concentration are highly 
praiseworthy, but not in a charming direction. His 
indifference to beauty tells against him. Jonson, even 
in his farces, is ponderous, and if we acknowledge '' the 
flat sanity and smoke-dried sobriety" of his best pas- 
sages, what words can we find for the tedium of his 
worst ? He was an intellectual athlete of almost un- 



114 MODERN -ENGLISH LITERATURE 

equalled vigour, who chose to dedicate the essentially 
prosaic forces of his mind to the art of poetry, because 
the age he lived in was pre-eminently a poetic one. 
With such a brain and such a will as his he could not 
but succeed. If he had stuck to bricklaying, he must 
have rivalled Inigo Jones. But the most skilful and 
headstrong master - builder cannot quite become an 
architect of genius. 

There is no trace of the strict Jonsonian buskin in 
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher; as even con- 
temporary critics perceived, they simply continued the 
pure romanticism of Shakespeare, and they seemed to 
carry it further and higher. We no longer think their 
noon brighter than his '' dawning hours," but we admit 
that in a certain sense the great Twin Brethren pro- 
ceeded beyond him in their warm, loosely-girdled plays. 
They exaggerated all the dangerous elements which he 
had held restrained ; they proceeded, in fact, downwards, 
towards the inevitable decadence, gay with all the dol- 
phin colours of approaching death. It is difficult to 
assign to either writer his share in the huge and florid 
edifice which bears their joint names. Their own 
age attributed to Fletcher the '^ keen treble " and to 
Beaumont the '' deep bass " — comedy, that is, and 
tragedy respectively. Modern investigation has found 
less and less in their work which can be definitely 
ascribed to Beaumont, who, indeed, died so early as 
1616. It is generally believed that the partnership lasted 
no longer than from 1608 to 161 1, and that the writing 
of only some dozen out of the entire fifty-five plays was 
involved in it. Were it not that the very noblest are 
among these few, which include the Maid's Tragedy and 
Philaster, A King and No King and the Knight of the 



BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER 115 

Bmniing Pestle , we might almost -disregard the shadowy 
name of Beaumont, and treat this whole mass of 
dramatic literature as belonging to Fletcher, who went 
on writing alone, or with Massinger, until shortly before 
his death in 1625. The chronological sequence of these 
dramas, only about ten of which were printed during 
Fletcher's lifetime, remains the theme of bold and con- 
tradictory conjecture. 

We have to observe in these glowing and redundant 
plays a body of lyrico-dramatic literature, proceeding 
directly from and parallel to the models instituted by 
Shakespeare, and continued for nearly ten years after his 
death. Nothing else in English is so like Shakespeare as 
a successful scene from a romantic comedy of Fletcher. 
Superficially, the language, the verse, the mental attitude 
often seem absolutely identical, and it is a singular 
tribute to the genius of the younger poet that he can 
endure the parallel for a moment. It is only for a 
moment ; if we take Fletcher at his very best — in the 
ardent and melodious scenes of the False One, for in- 
stance, where, amid an array of the familiar Roman 
names, we find him desperately and directly challenging 
comparison with Antony and Cleopatra — we have only to 
turn from the shadow back to the substance to see how 
thin and unreal is this delicately tinted, hectic, and 
phantasmal picture of passion by the side of Shake- 
speare's solid humanity. Jonson has lost the stage 
because his personages are not human beings, but types 
of character, built up from without, and vitalised by no 
specific or personal springs of action. Beaumont and 
Fletcher are equally dead from the theatrical point of 
view, but from an opposite cause : their figures.have not 
proved too hard and opaque for perennial interest, but 



ii6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

too filmy and undulating ; they possess not too much, 
but too little solidity. They are vague embodiments of 
instincts, faintly palpitating with desires and emulations 
and eccentricities, but not built up and set on firm feet 
by the practical genius of dramatic creation. 

Yet no conception of English poetry is complete with- 
out a reference to these beautiful, sensuous, incoherent 
plays. The Alexandrine genius of Beaumont and Fletcher 
w^as steeped through and through in beauty ; and so 
quickly did they follow the fresh morning of Elizabethan 
poetry that their premature sunset was tinged with dewy 
and '^ fresh-quilted " hues of dawn. In the short span 
of their labours they seem to take hold of the entire 
field of the drama, from birth to death, and Fletcher's 
quarter of a century helps us to see how rapid and direct 
was the decline. If the talent of Jonson had been more 
flexible, if the taste of Fletcher had not been radically 
so relaxed and luxurious, these two great writers should 
have carried English drama on after the death of 
Shakespeare — with less splendour, of course, yet with 
its character unimpaired. Unfortunately, neither of 
these excellent men, though all compact with talent, 
had the peculiar gift opportune to the moment's need, 
and ten years undid what it had taken ten years to 
create and ten more to sustain. 

Around these leading figures there are grouped an 
infinite number of dramatists, some almost as deserving 
as Fletcher and Jonson of detailed notice, others scarcely 
lifted visibly out of the bewildering crowd of playwrights. 
Before the close of the reign of James I. it is believed 
that more than a thousand plays had been produced in 
London, and but few of these were without some spark 
of psychological audacity or lyrical beauty. This is the 



MARSTON: CHAPMAN 117 

serried mountain-mass which, on a hasty glance, seems 
no more than the shoulders and bastions out of which 
the huge peak of Shakespeare rises. Most of the more 
salient of these secondary and tertiary dramatists are 
exceedingly unequal, and assert the fame they pos- 
sess on the score of one or two brilliant fragments 
exalted by Lamb or by later critics, by whom the cult of 
these writers has been pushed to some extravagance. It 
must suffice here to pass rapidly over the claims of these 
playwrights. Among pure EHzabethans, fellow-workers 
with the young Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker claim^s 
respect for a certain pitiful compassionateness, a tender 
lyric sweetness, which occasionally finds very delicate 
expression in brief passages which may atone for pages 
upon pages of flabby incoherence. JOHN Marston, 
whose versification owes much to Marlowe, was a harsh 
and strident satirist, a screech-owl among the singing- 
birds ; in the first decade of the seventeenth century 
he produced a series of vigorous rude tragedies and 
comedies which possess a character of their own, not 
S3aTipathetic at all, but unique in its consistent note of 
caustic misanthropy, and often brilliantly written. 

The ponderous George Chapman, who has other and 
better claims upon us than his dramas offer — since he was 
the admirable translator of Homer — issued between 1598 
and 1608 a series of bombastic historical tragedies and 
loosely articulated romantic comedies which have been 
admired by thorough-going fanatics of the Elizabethan 
drama, but in which, to a common observer, the faults 
seem vastly to outweigh the rare and partial merits. 
The errors of the school, its extravagance of sentiment, 
its brutal insensibility, its turgid diction, its mean and 
cruel estimate of women, its neglect of dramatic struc- 



ii8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ture, its incoherence, are nowhere seen in greater rehef 
than in the laborious dramas of Chapman. 

Of these men we can form a more or less distinct per- 
sonal impression. Others, of higher merit as writers for 
the stage, are absolutely shrouded voices. In the centre 
of the choir, but quite invisible, stands the figure of 
Thomas Heywood, a voluble secondary writer in the 
class of Shakespeare and Fletcher, claiming ^^ an entire 
hand, or at least a main finger," in no fewer than 220 
plays. He is remarkable chiefly for a pleasing medio- 
crity in picturesqueness, a prosaic, even spirit of flowing 
romance. Heywood rises once to real force of emotion 
in the naked, sombre atonement of A Woman Killed with 
Kindness, To THOMAS MiDDLETON the sweet uniformity 
of Heywood seemed insipid, and he strove after constant 
effect in violent complexity of plot and the vicissitudes 
of piratical adventure. He attempted every species of 
drama, and his reputation is weakened by his careless 
comedies, of which too many have survived. Had none 
but those fantastic imbroglios the Changeling and the 
Spanish Gipsy come down to us, Middleton would rank 
higher among the English poets than he does. Although 
a great many of his plays are lost, he is still weighed 
down by his abundance. For many years he was 
associated with William Rowley, an actor -author of 
whom little definite is known. 

Much greater than these, greater in some respects than 
any but Shakespeare, is John Webster, who requires 
but a closer grasp of style and a happier architecture to 
rank among the leading English poets. The Duchess of 
Malfy^ which is believed to have been produced in 161 2, 
has finer elements of tragedy than exist elsewhere out- 
side the works of Shakespeare. In a ruder form, we find 



WEBSTER 119 

the same distinguished intensity of passion in the earher 
White Devil. Webster has so splendid a sense of the 
majesty of death, of the mutabihty of human pleasures, 
and of the velocity and weight of destiny, that he rises to 
conceptions which have an ^schylean dignity ; but, un- 
happily, he grows weary of sustaining them, his ideas of 
stage-craft are rudimentary and spectacular, and his 
single well-constructed play, Appius and Vi^'ginia^ has a 
certain disappointing tameness. Most of the Elizabethan 
and Jacobean dramatists are now read only in extracts, 
and this test is highly favourable to Webster, who strikes 
us as a very noble poet driven by the exigencies of fashion 
to wTite for a stage, the business of which he had not 
studied and in which he took no great interest. Of 
Cyril Tourneur, in whom the qualities of Webster are 
discovered driven to a grotesque excess, the same may 
be said. His two lurid tragedies surpass in horror of 
iniquity and profusion of ghastly innuendo all other 
compositions of their time. Cyril Tourneur is prince 
of those whose design is ''to make our flesh creep," and 
occasionally he still succeeds. This list of playwrights 
might be indefinitely lengthened. Nothing has been 
said of Day, of Chettle, of Field, of Tailor ; but our 
general survey would be merely confused by an attempt 
to distinguish too clearly the vanishing points in the 
crowded panorama. 

In this glow^ing spring-tide of Elizabeth, all human 
speech so naturally turned to verse that men of high 
talent became poets w^hen nature perhaps intended 
them to be historians or philosophers. In the laureate, 
Samuel Daniel, we meet with the first example of poetry 
beginning to wither on the bough. Daniel's grace, 
smoothness, and purity seem to belong to a much later 



120 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

period^ and to a time when the imagination had lost its 
early fervour. He wrote lengthy historical poems, be- 
sides numerous sonnets, masques, and epistles. These 
last, which have the merit of brevity, are Daniel's most 
attractive contribution to English literature, and are singu- 
larly elegant in their stately, limpid flow of moral reflec- 
tion. In prose, Daniel showed himself one of the most 
instructed of our early critics of poetry. Another philo- 
sophical writer, on whose style the turbulent passion of 
the age has left but little mark, is the great Irish jurist, 
Sir John Davys, who, in his youth, composed several 
poems of the highest merit in their limited field. In 
his Nosce Teipsum, a treatise of considerable length and 
perspicuous dignity, dealing with the immortality of the 
soul, Davys was the first to employ on a long flight 
the solemn four-line stanza of which the type is supplied 
by the Elegy in a Cotmtry Churchyard, Three years 
earlier, in 1596, he had printed a most ingenious philo- 
sophical poem. Orchestra, in praise of dancing ; but the 
delicacy of Davys's talent is best seen in a little work 
less known than either of these, the Hymns of Astrcea, 
Both Daniel and Davys offer early and distinguished 
examples of the employment of imagination to illuminate 
elaborate mental processes. 

Each of these men might easily have given their talent 
all to prose. Their friend and companion, Michael 
Drayton, was not a better poet, but he was much more 
persistently devoted to the cultivation of the art of verse, 
and regarded himself as absolutely consecrated to the 
Muses. During a life more prolonged than that of most 
of his contemporaries, he never ceased to write — fever- 
ishly, crudely, copiously, very rarely giving to his work 
that polish which it needed to make it durable. Of his lyri- 



DRAYTON 1 2 I 

cal vocation there could be no doubt ; yet, if Daniel and 
Davys were prose-men who wrote poetry, Drayton was 
a prosaic poet. His masterpiece of topographical inge- 
nuity, the Poly-Olbio7i, a huge British gazetteer in broken- 
backed twelve-syllable verse, is a portent of misplaced 
energy. In his earlier historical pieces Drayton more 
closely resembles Daniel, whom, however, he exceeds in 
his lyrics as much as he limps behind him in his attempts 
at gnomic verse. Drayton writes like a man, and a few 
of his odes are still read w^ith ferx^our ; but his general 
compositions, in spite of all their variety, abundance, and 
accomplishment, fail to interest us ; a prosy flatness 
spoils his most ambitious efforts. He helps us to com- 
prehend the change which was to come in sixty years, 
and through Cowley he prophesies of Dryden. Now, 
did space permit, we should speak of the coarse and fus- 
cous satirists of the Elizabethan time, and of such sym- 
bolists as the fantastic Lord Brooke. But these, interesting 
as in themselves they are, must hardly detain us here. 

In the opening years of the seventeenth century the 
imitation of Spenser Avas cultivated by many disciples, 
among whom the most interesting Avere the Fletchers, 
cousins of the dramatist, and William Browne of Tavi- 
stock. In this group the predominant talent was that of 
■Giles Fletcher, to whom, indeed, the rarer quality can 
scarcely be denied. He was the author of the finest reli- 
gious poem produced in English literature between the 
Vision of Piers Plowjnan and Paradise Lost. In several 
passages of his fourfold Christ's Victory and TriumpJi 
(1610) Giles Fletcher solved the difficult problem of how 
to be at once gorgeous and yet simple, majestic and yet 
touching. At his apogee he surpasses his very master, 
for his imagination lifts him to a spiritual sublimity. In 
9 



122 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the beatific vision in his fourth canto we are reminded 
of no lesser poem than the Paj^adiso. It is right to say 
that these splendours are not sustained, and that Giles 
Fletcher is often florid and sometimes merely trivial. 
The sonorous purity and elevation of Giles Fletcher at his 
best give more than a hint of the approaching Milton, and 
he represents the Spenserian tradition at its very highest. 
But a poet was in the field who was to sweep the plea- 
sant flowers of the disciples of Spenser before him as 
ruthlessly as a mower cuts down the daisies with his 
scythe. In this age of mighty wits and luminous 
imaginations, the most robust and the most elaborately 
trained intellect was surely that of John Donne. Born 
as early as 1573, and associated with many of the purely 
Elizabethan poets, we have yet the habit of thinking of 
him as wholly Jacobean, and the instinct is not an 
erroneous one, for he begins a new age. His poems 
were kept in manuscript until two years after his death 
in 163 1, but they were widely circulated, and they exer- 
cised an extraordinary effect. Long before any edition 
of Donne was published, the majority of living English 
verse-writers were influenced by the main peculiarities 
of his style. He wrote satires, epistles, elegies, sonnets, 
and lyrics, and although it is in the last mentioned that 
his beauties are most frequent, the essence of Donne, 
the strange personal characteristic which made him so 
unlike every one else, is redolent in all. He rejected 
whatever had pleased the Elizabethan age ; he threw the 
fashionable humanism to the winds ; he broke up the 
accepted prosody ; he aimed at a totally new method in 
diction, in illustration, in attitude. He was a realist, who 
studded his writings with images drawn from contempo- 
rary life. For grace and mellifluous floridity he substi- 



DONNE 123 

tutecl audacity, intensity, a proud and fulgurant darkness, 
as of an intellectual thunder-cloud. 

Unfortunately, the genius of Donne was not equal to 
his ambition and his force. He lacked the element 
needed to fuse his brilliant intuitions into a classical 
shape. He aimed at becoming a great creative reformer, 
but he succeeded only in disturbing and dislocating lite- 
rature. He was the blind Samson in the Elizabethan 
gate, strong enough to pull the beautiful temple of 
Spenserian fancy about the ears of the worshippers, but 
powerless to offer them a substitute. What he gave to 
poetry in exchange for what he destroyed was almost 
wholly deplorable. For sixty years the evil taint of 
Donne rested on us, and our tradition is not free from it 
yet. To him — almost to him alone — we owe the tortured 
irregularities, the monstrous pedantries, the alembicated 
verbiage of the decline. ^^ Rhyme's sturdy cripple," as 
Coleridge called him, Donne is the father of all that is 
exasperating, affected, and '' m.etaphysical" in English 
poetry. He represented, with Marino in Italy, Gongora 
in Spain, and Bartas and D'Aubigne in France, that 
mania for an inflamed and eccentric extravagance of 
fancy w^hich was racing over Europe like a hideous new 
disease ; and the ease and rapidity with which the infec- 
tion was caught, shows how ready the world of letters 
was to succumb to such a plague. That Donne, in 
flashes, and especially in certain of his lyrics, is still able 
to afford us imaginative ecstasy of the very highest order 
— he has written a few single lines almost comparable 
with the best of Shakespeare's — must not blind us, in a 
general survey, to the maleficence of his genius. No one 
has injured English writing more than Donne, not even 
Carlyle. 



124 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Side by side with the magnificent efflorescence of 
poetical and particularly of dramatic talent in England^ 
there was a certain development of prose also, but it was 
curiously inadequate to the needs of the race. With 
relative exceptions, prose remained, till the end of this 
period, either rude or else fantastic, and in either case 
encumbered. With Spenser and Marlowe and Shake- 
speare, there is but one master of prose worthy to be 
mentioned, and that is the " obscure, harmless " priest 
w^ho wrote the Ecclesiastical Polity. Richard Hooker 
was of the generation of Raleigh, Sidney, and Fulke 
Greville, those paladins of the English Renaissance, and 
where he sat with downcast eyes, henpecked, withdrawn 
into the ^* blessed bashfulness " of his little country study, 
he reflected in the intellectual order their splendid qualities. 
He had been for a few years Master of the Temple, where 
he ^' spake pure Canterbury," that is to say, proclaimed 
a conservative Anglicanism as opposed to the ^' Geneva " 
of the Calvinists. But his masterpiece w^as prepared for 
the press in the retreat of Boscombe, under the scourge 
of his terrible mother-in-law. The first four books of it 
appeared in 1594, another in 1597, and then in 1600 
Hooker died prematurely, 'Svorn out, not with age, but 
study and holy mortifications." The last three books of 
the Polity were ready for the press, but within a few days 
of his death they had disappeared, and what we now 
possess in their place is of doubtful authenticity-. 

Hooker is the first important philosophical and religious 
English writer. He is the earliest to perceive the import- 
ance of evolution, the propriety of preparing and conduct- 
ing to a conclusion a great, consistent scheme. He sees 
things clearly and cool'y in an age w^hen controversial 
passion and political turmoil turned all other men's blood 



HOOKER 125 

to fever. When he was at the Temple he had felt the 
pulse of life ; he was profoundly aware of the demands 
and requirements of the age ; but something infinitely 
serene in his intellectual nature lifted Hooker, even in the 
act of disputation, far above the wrangling of the sects. 
In his masterpiece, the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity^ we 
find no trace of that violent provinciality which is so tire- 
some in Elizabethan prose ; the author spreads his wings 
broadly and gently, he dismisses all ideas which are not 
germane to humanity. This singular majesty of Hooker 
is aided by the fact that his First Book, in which the 
reader learns to become rxquainted with him, particu- 
larly exemplifies his breadth. It deals with the general 
principle of law in the universe ; it is a solemn eulogy of 
the diapason of discipline in nature. 

The style of Hooker is distinguished by a sober and 
sustained eloquence. Certain of his contemporaries 
might equal him in purple passages, but not one of them 
approached his even flight. He was Latinised, not as 
his lumbering predecessors had been, but in the true 
humanistic spirit ; and he had studied Aristotle and 
Plato w^ith constant advantage to his expression. Hooker 
is, indeed, one of the earliest of our authors, in prose or 
verse, to show the influence of pure Hellenic culturey^ 
The limpidity and elegance of his periods are extraordi- 
nary. When all England was in bondage. Hooker alone 
freed himself from the clogged concatenation of phrases 
which makes early English prose so unwieldv ; vet he 
gained his liberty at no such cost of grace and fulness 
as Bacon did in the snip-snap of his Essays. Hooker 
discovered, by the help of the ancients and the Bible, a 
middle way between long-drawn lusciousness and curt 
formality. He does not strive after effect ; but when he 



126 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

is moved, his style is instinct with music. He never 
abuses quotation ; he never forgets that he has an argu- 
ment to conduct, and that life is short. In other words, 
he is the first great writer of practical English prose, and 
for a long time there is none other like unto him. 

The vices of obscurity and uncouthness, indeed, weigh 
heavily upon most of the prose of this period. When 
prose wished to please, it was as stiff and florid as the 
gala-dress of Elizabeth's Court ; when it merely wished 
to instruct, nothing could be more inelegant and hum- 
drum. Some of the abundant literature of geographical 
adventure was spirited and forcible ; it reached its highest 
point of merit in Raleigh's Guiana of 1596. The novel, 
or rather prose rom^ance in its most rudimentary shape, 
had been essayed by Greene, Lodge, Nash, and others, 
in a form which displayed a pitiful poverty by the side 
of the vividly psychological drama of the next genera- 
tion. Criticism made a variety of primitive essays, of 
which Daniel's Defence of Rhyme is perhaps the least im- 
perfect. These pamphlets attempted to give a humanistic 
solution to the practical literary problems of the day, 
but seldom proceeded beyond a vague and learned 
trifling with the unessential. Finally, in the year 1597 
sketches of ten of Bacon's sagacious Essays appeared. No 
work in the English language has been praised with more 
thoughtless extravagance. It has one great merit, it 
tended to break up the encumbered, sinuous Elizabethan 
sentence, and prepare for prose as Dryden and Halifax 
wrote it. But its ornament is largely borrowed from the 
school of Lyly and Lodge, its thoughts are common- 
places, and its arrangement of parts is desultory and 
confused ; while Bacon's real m.astery of English was a 
thing which came to him later, and will occupy our 



THE BIBLE 127 

attention in the following chapter. For superficial pur- 
poses, there are only two books of Elizabethan prose 
in which we need to study the progress of that species 
of literary expression, namely, the Eiiphues of Lyly, a 
brilliant experiment, and the Ecclesiastical Polity of 
Hooker, a permanent classic. 

A literary enterprise of far-reaching importance was 
set in motion by James I. when he called together at 
Hampton Court, in 1604, a conference to discuss the 
propriety of finally revising the English version of the 
Scriptures. An adroit and practical scheme, drawn up 
by the hand of the King himself, was laid before the 
delegates for their consideration. It was accepted, and 
in 1607 a committee of nearly fifty divines set to work to 
produce an Authorised Version which should supersede 
the not entirely satisfactory Bishops' Bible, issued by 
Archbishop Parker in 1568. The general editorship of 
the revision was placed in the hands of the most learned 
personage in an erudite age, Lancelot Andrewes, 
Bishop of Winchester, who was also responsible for 
some parts of the work in detail. Andrewes was cele- 
brated for his elegant and impassioned delivery, he was 
Stella prcEdicantiuniy and he seems to have had a positive 
genius for the cadences of ecclesiastical language. It 
must not be overlooked that the English of the version 
of 161 1, which is what was alone in use until the present 
generation, was not truly Jacobean, or even Elizabethan, 
but an archaic and eclectic arrangement of phrases, the 
bulk of which had come down to Andrewes and his 
colleagues from Parker, and so from Cranmer, and so 
from Coverdale and Tyndale, and so from Wyclifie and 
Purvey, and represented, in fact, a modification of a 
mediaeval impression of the Vulgate. The Authorised 



128 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

English Bible represents the tongue of no historical 
period, but is an artificial product, selected with ex- 
quisite care, from the sacred felicities of two centuries 
and a half. Its effect upon later authorship has been 
constant, and of infinite benefit to style. Not a native 
author but owes something of his melody and his charm 
to the echo of those Biblical accents, which were the 
first fragments of purely classical English to attract his 
admiration in childhood. 



IV 

THE DECLINE 

1620-1660 

The decline of letters in England began almost as soon 
as Shakespeare was in his grave, and by the death of 
James I. had become obvious. The period which we 
have now to consider was illuminated by several names 
of very high genius both in prose and verse, and by 
isolated works of extraordinary value and beauty. In 
spite, however, of the lustre which these give to it, no 
progress was made for forty years in the general struc- 
ture of literature ; at best, things remained where they 
were, and, in literary history, to stop still is to go back. 
It is possible that we should have a different tale to tell 
if the most brilliant Englishman who survived Shake- 
speare had realised what it was possible to do with the 
tongue of his country. At the close of James's reign 
Francis Bacon stood, as Ben Jonson put it, ^'the mark 
and acme of our language," but he gave its proficients 
little encouragement. He failed, for all his intuition, to 
recognise the turn of the tide ; he thought that books 
written in English would never be citizens of the world. 
Anxious to address Europe, the universe, he felt no in- 
terest in his English contemporaries, and passed through 
the sublime age of Elizabethan poetry without conceding 
the fact of its existence. 



130 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

But after his fall, in May 162 1, Bacon wakened afresh 
to the importance of his native language. In a poignant 
letter to the King, who was to '^ plough him up and sow 
him w^ith an3^thing," he promised a harvest of writings in 
the vernacular. In 1605 he had already made a splendid 
contribution to criticism in his Advancement of Learn- 
ing ; otherwise, he had mainly issued his works in 
Ciceronian Latin. But in 1621 he finished his History 
of Heniy VI L; in 1624 he was writing the New Atlantis ; 
in 1625 the Essays (first issued in nucleus in 1597, and 
meagrely enlarged in 161 2) were published in full, and 
the Sylva Sylvarum was completed. These works, with 
his public and private letters, combine to form the 
English writings of Bacon. They constitute a noble 
mass of work, but there is no question that the repu- 
tation of Bacon dwindles if we are forced to cut aw^ay 
his Latin books ; he no longer seems to have taken 
the whole world of knowledge into his province. And 
in his English w^orks, considered alone, we have to 
confess a certain poverty. He who thought it the first 
distemper of learning, that men should study words and 
not matter, is now in the singular condition of having 
outlived his matter, or, at least, a great part of it, while 
his words are as vivid as ever. We could now wish 
that he could have been persuaded to ^' hunt more after 
choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clear com- 
position of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the 
clauses," qualities which he had the temerity to profess 
to despise. 

Bacon described himself as '^a bell-ringer, who is up 
first to call others to church." The Advancement of 
Learning w^as dictated by this enthusiasm. He would 
rise at cock-crowing to bid the whole world welcome to 



BACON 131 

the intellectual feast. This is the first book in the English 
language which discusses the attitude of a mind seeking 
to consolidate and to arrange the stores of human know- 
ledge. It was planned in two parts, the first to be a 
eulogy of the excellence of learning — its '^ proficience " — 
and the second to be a survey of the condition of the 
theme — its '^ advancement." Bacon had little leisure 
and less patience, and his zeal often outran his judg- 
ment in the act of composition. The Advancement is 
written, or finished at least, obviously in too great haste ; 
the Second Book is sometimes almost slovenly, and the 
close of it leaves us nowhere. But the opening part, in 
which Bacon sums up firsts.the discredits and then the dig- 
nity of learning, defending wisdom, and justifying it to its 
sons, remains one of the great performances of the seven- 
teenth century. The matter of it is obsolete, human know- 
ledge having progressed so far forwards and backwards 
since 1605 ; and something dry and unripe in Bacon's 
manner — which mellowed in later life — diminishes our 
pleasure in reading what is none the less a very noble 
work, and one intended to be the prologue to the author's 
vast edifice of philosophical inquiry. At this point, hovv^- 
ever, he unluckily determined to abandon English brick 
for Latin stone. 

This futile disregard of his own language robs English 
literature of the greater part of its heritage in Bacon. 
He desired an immortality of readers, and fancied that 
to write in English would ^'play the bankrupt with 
books." Hence, even in his Essays we are conscious 
of a certain disdain. The man is not a serious com- 
poser so much as a collector of maxims and observa- 
tions ; he keeps his note-book and a pencil ever at his 
side, and jots down what occurs to him. If it should 



132 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

prove valuable, he will turn it out of this ragged and 
parochial English into the statelier and more lasting 
vehicle of Latin. He has no time to think about style ; 
he will scribble for you a whole book of apophthegms in 
a morning. The Essays themselves — -his '^ recreations/' 
as he carelessly called them — are often mere notations or 
headings for chapters imperfectly enlarged, in many cases 
merely to receive the impressions of a Machiavellian in- 
genuity. They are almost all too short ; the longest, 
those on '' Friendship " and '^ Gardens," being really the 
only ones in which the author gives himself space to turn 
round. As a constructor of the essay considered as a 
department of literary art, Bacon is not to be named 
within hail of Montaigne. 

Bacon desired that prose should be clear, masculine, 
and apt, and these adjectives may generally be applied 
to what he wrote with any care in English. He was 
so picturesque a genius, and so abounding in intellectual 
vitality, that he secured the graces without aiming at 
them. His Essays hold a certain perennial charm, artless 
as they are in arrangement and construction ; but the 
student of literature will find greater instruction in ex- 
amining the more sustained and uplifted paragraphs of 
the Advancement^ where he can conveniently parallel 
Bacon with Hooker, the only earlier prose- writer who 
can be compared with him. He will observe with 
interest that the diction of Bacon is somewhat more 
archaic than that of Hooker. 

When Bacon died, in 1626, he left English literature 
painfully impoverished. For the next fifteen years it 
may be said that prose of the higher kind scarcely 
existed, and that there threatened to be something like 
a return to barbarism. But two works which belong to 



BURTON 133 

a slightly earlier period must first of all be discussed. 
No book is more characteristic of the age, of its merits 
alike and of its faults, than that extraordinary emporium, 
the Anatomy of Melaficholy, first issued in 162 1. ROBERT 
Burton, a clergyman, mainly resident at Christchurch, 
Oxford, was the author of this vast monograph on what 
we should now call neuresthenia. The text of Burton 
has been unkindly styled a collection of clause-heaps, 
and he is a typical example of that extreme sinuosity, 
one of the detestable tricks of the schools, to which the 
study of the ancients betrayed our early seventeenth- 
century prose-writers. Of the width of reading of such 
men as Bacon and Burton and Hales there have been 
no later specimens, and these writers, but Burton above 
all others, burden their folio pages with a gorgeous 
spoil of '^ proofs " and '^ illustrations " from the Greek 
and Latin authors. The Anatomy of Melancholy, though 
started as a plain medical dissertation, grew to be, prac- 
tically, a huge canto of excerpts from all the known 
(and unknow^n) authors of Athens and Rome. All 
Burton's treasure was in Minerva's Tower, and the 
chamber that he fitted up there has been the favourite 
haunt of scholars in every generation. In his own his 
one book enjoyed a prodigious success, for it exactly 
suited and richly indulged the temper of the time. But 
Burton, delightful as he is, added nothing to the evolu- 
tion of English prose in this its dangerous hour of crisis. 
The vogue of his entertaining neurotic compendium really 
tended to retard the purification of the language. 

In 1623 was published a volume of prose so beautiful 
and unique that it must be mentioned here in spite of 
i's comparative obscurity, A Cypi^ess Gi^ove, by the ornate 
Scotch poet, William Drummond of Hawthornden. This 



134 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

was in substance nothing but a chain of philosophical 
arguments against the fear of death ; but in manner it was 
of a delicate fulness and harmony, a deliberate and studied 
mellifluousness, which reminds the reader of nothing so 
much as of the more elaborate passages of De Quincey. 
Never before in English, and not again for a generation, 
was prose written with so obvious an attention to the 
b.ilance of clauses and the euphony of phrases as is to be 
discovered in this curious little treatise of Drummond's, 
who deserves to be remembered, therefore, among the 
constructors of melodious style. 

With these exceptions, prose between Bacon and the 
school of 1640 is mainly of a trivial importance — the 
work of such fiery divines as Hall and Donne being ex- 
cepted. Under Charles I. the growth of English prose 
was arrested, save where it blossomed forth in the 
fashionable imitations of the clear and lively sketches of 
Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle. In 1598, Casaubon, 
to whom and to Scaliger the modern literatures of Europe 
owe so great a debt, had edited Theophrastus with a lumi- 
nous commentary. Joseph Hall, by his Characterisms 
(1608), and Sir Thomas Overbury, by his Characters 
(1614), had made the composition of similar short essays in 
humorous philosophy the rage. Theophrastus had con- 
hned himself to studies of the intrinsic behaviour of repre- 
sentative men. Bishop Hall, in his dignified little book, 
had added the qualifications for holding certain special 
offices. In the generation of which we are speaking, the 
example of Theophrastus, as seen through Hall and 
Overbury, combined with the imitation of Bacon to pro- 
duce a curious school of comic or ironic portraiture, 
partly ethical and partly dramatic, typical examples of 
which are the Microcosmogony of Earle, Owen Feltham's 



DONNE 135 

Resolves^ the Country Parson of George Herbert^ and even; 
we may say, the later pamphlets of Dekker. No small 
addition to the charm of these light essays-in-little was 
the hope of discovering in the philosophical portrait the 
face of a known contemporary. This sort of literature 
culminated in Europe in the work of La Bru3^ere, but 
not until 1688, and was afterwards elaborated by Addison. 
Meanwhile, it is true, the divines, and the great Dean 
of St. Paul's at their head, were preaching their obscure 
and disquieting sermons. John Doxne died in 163 1, 
but it was not until nine years later that an imperfect 
collection of his addresses was published. He is the 
noblest of the religious writers of England between 
Hooker and Jeremy Taylor ; and the qualities which 
mark his astonishing poems, their occasional majesty, 
their tossing and foaming imagination, their lapses into 
bad taste and unintelligibility, the sinister impression of 
a strange perversity of passion carefully suppressed in 
them — all these, though to a less marked degree, distin- 
guish the prose of Donne. Its beauties are of the savage 
order, and they display not only no consciousness of any 
rules which govern prose composition, but none of that 
chastening of rhetoric which had been achieved under 
Elizabeth by Hooker. Such books of Donne's as his 
paradox of suicide, the Biathanatos, unquestionably ex- 
hibit sympathy with what was morbid in the temper of 
the time ; they are to theology what the tragedies of Ford 
are to drama. Probably the strongest prose work pro- 
duced in England during the dead time of which we have 
spoken is William Chillingworth's Religion of Protes- 
tants (1637). This divine was somewhat slighted in his 
own age, as giving little show of learning in his dis- 
but the perspicuity of his style and the force of 



136 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

his reasoning commended him to the Anglican divines of 
the Restoration. It is characteristic that Tillotson had 
a great admiration for this humane latitudinarian, and 
that Locke wrote, '^ If you would have your son reason 
well, let him read Chillingworth." 

The masterpiece of Chillingworth stands almost alone^ 
in a sort of underwood of Theophrastian character- 
sketches. The fashion for these studies was greatly 
encouraged by the decay of the drama^ and particu- 
larly by that of comedy. To understand the causes and 
symptoms of that decay, we have to reconsider the 
position of Ben Jonson. By 1625 the deaths of all the 
Predecessors, followed by those of Shakespeare, of Beau- 
mont, and finally of Fletcher, left Jonson in a condition 
of undisputed prestige. He had always been the most 
academic and dictatorial of the group, and now there 
was no one to challenge his supremacy. With health 
and a competency, it is probable that Ben Jonson would 
now have begun to exercise a wide authority, and he 
might have seriously modified the course of our literary 
history ; but he was cramped by poverty, and in 1626 
he was struck down, at the age at which Shakespeare 
had died, by paralysis. Jonson lived eleven years longer, 
but the spirit had evaporated from his genius, and he 
was but the sulky shadow of himself. The worst of it 
was that in some melancholy way he seems to have 
dragged English drama down with him, a blind Samson 
in his despair. The confused self-consciousness of those 
last comedies which Dryden cruelly styled his '' dotages" 
is reflected in the work of the young men who clustered 
round him, who comforted his gloomy hours of public 
failure, and who were proud to accept the title of his 
poetic sons. 



BEN JONSON 137 

In temperament Jonson differed wholly from the other 
leaders of Elizabethan drama. They^ without exception, 
were romantic ; he, by native bias, purely classical. It 
is not difficult to perceive that the essential quality of 
his mind had far more in common with Corneille and 
with Dryden than with Shakespeare. He was so full of 
intelligence that he was able to adopt, and to cultivate 
with some degree of zest, the outward forms of roman- 
ticism, but his heart was always with the Latins, and his 
favourite works, though not indeed his best, were his 
stiff and solid Roman tragedies. He brought labour to 
the construction of his poetry, and he found himself 
surrounded by facile pens, to whom he seemed, or 
fancied that he seemed, '^ barren, dull, lean, a poor 
writer." He did not .admire much of that florid orna- 
ment in which they delighted, and which we also have 
been taught to admire. He grew to hate the kind of 
drama which Marlowe had inaugurated. No doubt, 
sitting in the Apollo room of the Old Devil Tavern, with 
his faithful Cartwright, Brome, and Randolph round 
him, he would truculently point to the inscription above 
the chimney, Insipida poemata nulla recitantor, and not 
spare the masters of that lovely age which he had out- 
lived. He would speak ^' to the capacity of his hearers," 
as he tells us that the true artificer should do, and they 
would encourage him, doubtless, to tell of doctrines and 
precepts, of the dignity of the ancients, of Aristotle, 
'' first accurate critic and truest judge " of poetry. They 
would listen, nor be aware that, for all his wisdom, and 
ai] the lofty distinction of his intellect, the palmy hour 
of Enghsh drama — that hour in which it had sung out 
hke a child, ignorant of rules and precepts — had passed 
for ever. 



138 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

If the learning and enthusiasm of Jonson could not 
save it, it received little sustenance from other hands. 
One blow after another weakened and distracted it ; 
almost year by year, and with a sinister rapidity, it 
sank into desuetude. The deaths of Shakespeare and 
Beaumont placed tragedy and romantic comedy m.ainly 
in the lax hands of Fletcher, who for some eight years 
more poured forth his magnanimous and sunshiny plays, 
so musical, so dissolute, so fantastic. Already, in this 
beautiful dramatic literature of Fletcher's, we have 
sunken below the serene elevation of Shakespeare. 
Philip Massinger joins Fletcher, and about 1624 is 
found taking his place as the most active and popular 
dramatic poet of the hour. By this time the flood of 
unequal, hurried plays, poured forth by Heywood and 
Middleton, is beginning to slacken, and soon these belated 
Elizabethans are dead or silent. Massinger holds the field, 
v^ith an impetus that never equal? that of Fletcher, and 
a tamer versification, a prosier, less coherent construction. 
More serious and solid than his predecessors, he has less 
fire and colour than they, and less of the tumultuous 
ecstasy that carried them on its wings. He dies in 1638. 

Meanwhile, in James Shirley a placid and elegant 
talent makes its appearance, recurring, without vehe- 
mence or thrill, to the purely ornamental tradition of 
Shakespeare and Fletcher, and continuing, with a mild 
monotony, to repeat the commonplaces of the school 
until they are hopelessly out of fashion. Then, last of 
all, in a final brief blaze of the sinking embers, w^e 
encounter John Ford, perhaps as genuine a tragic poet 
as any one of his forerunners, Shakespeare alone ex- 
cepted, reverting for a moment to the old splendid 
diction, the haughty disregard of convention, the con- 



THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA 139 

tempt for ethical restrictions. And so the brief and 
magnificent school of English drama, begun by Marlowe 
scarcely more than a generation before, having blazed 
and crackled like a forest fire fed with resinous branches, 
sinks almost in a moment, and lingers only as a heap of 
white ash and glowing charcoal. 

The causes of the rapid decline of the drama have 
been sought in the religious and political disturbances 
of the country ; but, if we examine closely, we find that 
stage-poetry had begun to be reduced in merit before 
those disturbances had taken definite shape. It will 
probably be safer to recognise that the opening out of 
national interests took attention rnore and more away 
from what had always been an exotic entertainment, a 
pleasure mainly destined for the nobles and their re- 
tainers. There was a general growth of enthusiasm, 
of pubhc feeling, throughout England, and this was not 
favourable to the cultivation of a species of entertain- 
ment such as the drama had been under Elizabeth, a 
cloistered art destined exclusively for pleasure, without 
a didactic or a moral aim. For many years there con- 
tinued to persist an interest in the stage wide enough 
to fill the theatres, in spite of the growing suspicion of 
such amusements ; but the audiences rapidly grew less 
select and less refined, less able to appreciate the good, 
and more tolerant of the rude and bad. In technique 
there was a falling off so abrupt as to be quite astonish- 
ing, and not easily to be accounted for. The ''sons " of 
Ben Jonson, trained as they had been at his feet, sank 
into forms that were primitive in their rudeness. The 
curious reader may pursue the vanishing genius of poetic 
drama down through the writings of Randolph, of Jasper 
Mayne, of Cartwright, till he finds himself a bewildered 



I40 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

spectator of the last gibberings and contortions of the 
spectre in the inconceivable '^ tragedies '' of Suckling. 
If the wits of the universities, highly trained^ scholarly 
young men, sometimes brilliantly efficient in other 
branches of poetry, could do no better than this, what 
wonder that in ruder hands the very primitive notions 
with regard to dramatic construction and propriety were 
forgotten. Before Shakespeare had been a quarter of 
a century in his grave, Shirley was the only person left 
writing in England who could give to fiction in dialogue 
the very semblance of a work of art. 

We must pause for a moment to observe a highly 
interesting phenomenon. At the very moment when 
English drama was crumbling to dust, the drama of 
France was springing into vigorous existence. The con- 
jectured year of the performance of our last great play, 
the Bj'oken Hearty of Ford, is that of the appearance of the 
earliest of Corneille's tragedies. So rapidly did events 
follow one another, that when that great man produced Le 
Cid, English drama was moribund ; when his Rodogune 
was acted, it was dead ; and the appearance of his Agesilas 
saw it re-arisen under Dryden in totally different forms, 
and as though from a different hemisphere. It is impos- 
sible not to reflect that if the dramatic instinct had been 
strong in Milton, the profoundest of all religious tragedies 
might happen to be not that Polyeucte which we English 
have enviously to admire in the literature of France, but 
a play in which the noblest ideas of Puritanism might 
have been posed against worldly philosophy and sensual 
error. Yet even for a Milton in 1643 the ground would 
not have been clear as it was for Corneille. He had but 
to gather together and lift into splendid distinction ele- 
ments who'jc miin fault had been their imperfection. 



CARTWRIGHT 141 

For him, French tragedy, long preparing to blossom, was 
reaching its spring at last ; for us, our too brief summer 
was at an end, and, cloyed with fruit, the drama was 
hurrying through its inevitable autumn. If Ben Jonson, 
tired and old, had felt any curiosity in glancing across 
the Channel, he might have heard of the success of a 
goodly number of pieces by a poet destined, more exactly 
than any Englishman, to carry out Jonson's own ideal of a 
tragic poet. He had desired that a great tragedian should 
speciallv excel in '^ civil prudence and eloquence," and to 
whom can these qualities be attributed if not to Cor- 
neille ? The incoherent and scarce intelligible English 
dramatists of the decline vrere as blankly ignorant of the 
one as of the other. 

The laxity of versilication which our poetic drama per- 
mitted itself had much to answer for in the degradation 
of style. Ben Jonson had been too stiff ; Shakespeare, 
with a divine instuict, hung balanced across the point 
which divides hardness of versification from looseness ;. 
but in the soft hands of Fletcher, the' borders were already 
overpast, his follov%-ers became looser and more sinuous 
still, and the comparaive exactitude of Massinger and 
Shirley was compromised by their languor. The verse of 
Ford, it is true, is correct and elegant, with a slight rigi- 
dity that seems pre-Shakespearian. But among the names 
which follow these we find not one that understood wdiat 
dramatic blank verse should be. If there be an excep- 
tion, it is William Cartwright, whose plays, although 
they smell too much of the lamp, and possess no aptitude 
for the theatre, pour a good deal of waxen beauty into 
moulds of stately metre. It was of this typical Oxford 
poet, who died, still very young, in 1643, that Ben f onson 
said, ^* My son Cartwright writes all like a man." 



142 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

In one department of poetry, however, there is some- 
thing else to chronicle than decline. The reign of 
Charles I., so unillustrious in most branches of literature, 
produced a very fine school of lyric poets. Among these 
John Milton was easily the greatest, and between the 
years 163 1 and 1637 he contributed to English literature 
about two thousand of the most exquisite, the most per- 
fect, the most consummately executed verses which are 
to be discovered in the language. This apparition of 
Milton at Horton, without associates, without external 
stimulus. Virtue seeing ^' to do what Virtue would, by his 
own radiant light," this is one of the most extraordinary 
phenomena which we encounter in our history. Milton 
was born in 1608, and proceeded to Cambridge in 1625, 
where he remained until 1632. During these seven years 
the eastern University was one of the main centres of 
poetical animation in the country ; several true poets 
and a host of poetasters were receiving their education 
there. The poems of Dr. Donne, handed about in 
MS., were universally admired, and were the objects of 
incessant emulation. 

Of all this environment, happily but surprisingly, not 
a trace is to be found on Milton. We find, indeed, the 
evidences of a loving study of Shakespeare and of the 
ancients, and in his earliest work a distinct following of 
those scholars of Spenser, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, 
who had been prominent figures at Cambridge just be- 
fore Milton came into residence. What drew the young 
Milton to Giles Fletcher it is not difficult to divine. That 
writer's Christ's Victory and Triumph had been a really 
important religious poem, unequal in texture, but rising 
at its highest to something of that pure magnificence of 
imagination which was to be Milton's aim and glory. 



MILTON 143 

Phineas Fletcher had composed a Scriptural poem, the 
Apoilyonzs's, which was published in 16270 This was a 
fragment on the fall of the rebel angels, and Milton must 
have been greatly struck with it, for he paid it the com- 
pliment of borrowing considerably from it when he came 
to write Paradise Lost. When, at the close of 1629, 
Milton began his Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity y 
he was still closely imitating the form of these favourites 
of his, the Fletchers, until the fifth stanza was reached, 
and then he burst away in a magnificent measure of his 
own, pouring forth that hymn which carried elaborate 
lyrical writing higher than it had ever been taken before 
in England. 

But, gorgeous as was the Nativity Ode, it could not 
satisfy the scrupulous instinct of Milton. Here were fire, 
melody, colour ; what, then, was lacking ? Well, purity 
of style and that '' doric delicacy " of which Milton was 
to be the prototype — these were lacking. We read the 
Nativity Ode with rapture, but sometimes with a smile. 
Its language is occasionally turbid, incongruous, even 
absurd. We should be sorry that ^^the chill marble 
seems to sweat," and that " the sun in bed . . . pillows 
his chin upon an orient wave," if these were not like the 
tricks of a dear and valued friend, oddities that seem part 
of his whole exquisite identity. Such excrescences as 
these we have to condone in almost all that we find 
delightful in seventeenth-century literature. We may 
easily slip into believing these conceits and flatnesses to 
be in themselves beautiful ; but this is a complacency 
which is to be avoided, and we should father dwell on 
such stanzas of the Nativity Ode as xix. and xxiv., in 
which not a word, not a syllable, mars the distinguished 
perfection of the poem, but in which every element com- 



144 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

bines to produce a solemn, harmonious, and imposing 
effect. 

The evolution of Milton continued, though in 1630 we 
find him (in the Passion) returning to the mannerisms 
of the Fletchers. But, in the ^^ Sonnet on his Twenty- 
Third Birthday" he is adult at last, finally dedicated, as a 
priest, to the sacred tasks of the poetic life, and ready 
to abandon all '' the earthly grossness '' which dragged 
down the literature of his age. And next we hear him 
put the golden trumpet to his lips and blow the melodies 
of *^ At a Solemn Music," in w^hich no longer a trace of 
the '* metaphysical " style mars the lucid perfection of 
utterance, but in which words arranged with consummate 
art summon before us a vision not less beatific than is 
depicted by Dante in his Paradiso or by Fra Angelico in 
his burning frescoes. Beyond these eight-and-twenty 
lines, no poet, and not Milton himself, has proceeded. 
Human language, at all events in English, has never 
surpassed, in ecstasy of spiritual elevation or in pure 
passion of melody, this little canzonet, which was, in 
all probability, the first-fruits of Milton's retirement to 
Horton. 

In the sylvan Buckinghamshire village, ^' far from the 
noise of town, and shut up in deep retreats," Milton 
abandoned himself to study and reflection. He was 
weighed upon, even thus early, by a conviction of his 
sublime calling ; he waited for the seraphim of the 
Eternal Spirit to touch his lips with the hallowed fire of 
inspiration, and he was neither idle nor restless, neither 
ambitious nor indifferent. He read with extreme eager- 
ness, rising early and retiring late ; he made himself 
master of all that could help him towards his mysterious 
vocation in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. 



MILTON 145 

To mark the five years of his stay at Horton, he pro- 
duced five immortal poems, L Allegro , II Pensei^osOy 
Arcades y ComuSy Lj/cidas, all essentially lyrical, though 
two of them assume the semi-dramatic form of the 
pageant or masque, a species of highly artificial poetry 
to which Ben Jonson and Campion had lent their 
prestige in the preceding age. 

The ineffable refinement and dignity of these poems 
found a modest publicity in 1645. But the early poetry 
of Milton captured little general favour, and one small 
edition of it sufficed for nearly thirty years. No one 
imitated or was influenced by Milton's lyrics, and until 
the eighteenth century was well advanced they were 
scarcely read. Then their celebrity began, and from 
Gray and Collins onward, every EngHsh poet of emi- 
nence has paid his tribute to // Penseroso or to Lycidas, 
If we examine closely the diction of these Horton poems, 
we shall find that in almost all of them (in Comus least) 
a mannerism which belonged to the age faintly dims 
their purity of style. Certain little tricks we notice are 
Italianisms, and the vogue of the famous Marino, author 
of the Adone, who had died while Milton was at Cam- 
bridge, was responsible, perhaps, for something. But, 
on the whole, lyrical poetry in this country has not 
reached a higher point, in the reflective and impersonal 
order, than is reached in the central part of L' Allegro 
and in the Spirit's epilogue to Comus. 

Other lyrics there were less imperishable than these, 
yet excellent in their way, and vastly more popular than 
Milton's. Almost without exception these were the work 
of non-professional authors ^ — soldiers, clergymen, or 
college wits — thrown off in the heat of youth, and given 
first to the w^orld posthumously, by the piety of some 



146 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

friend. Of the leading lyrists of the earlier Cavalier 
group of the reign of Charles I., William Habington 
was the only one who published his poems in his life- 
time. The forerunner of them all, and potentially the 
greatest, was Thomas Carew, who as early as 1620 was 
probably writing those radiant songs and ''raptures" 
which were not printed until twenty years later. To an 
amalgam of Carew and Donne (whose poems, also, were 
first published posthumously, in 1633) most of the 
fashionable poetry written in England between 1630 and 
1660 may be attributed. Carew invented a species of 
love-poetry which exactly suited the temper of .the time. 
It w^as a continuation of the old Elizabethan pastoral, but 
more personal, more ardent, more coarse, and more 
virile. He was the frankest of hedonists, and his glowing 
praise of woman has genuine erotic force. In technical 
respects, the flexibility and solidity of his verse w^as 
remarkable, and, though he greatly admired Donne, he 
w^as able to avoid many of Donne's worst faults. Carew 
cultivated the graces of a courtier; he was a Catullus 
holding the post of sewer-in-ordinary to King Charles I. 
His sensuality, therefore, is always sophisticated and well 
bred, and he is the father of the whole family of gallant 
gentlemen, a little the w^orse for wine, who chirruped 
under Celia's window down to the very close of the 
century. Indeed, to tell the truth, what began with 
Carew may be said to have closed with Congreve. 

Of the same class are Sir John Suckling, who wrote 
some fifteen years later, and Richard Lovelace, who in- 
ditedthe typical song of aristocratic insubordination, as late 
as 1642 and onwards. The courtly race re-emerged after 
the Restoration in Sedley and Dorset, and was very melo- 
diously revived in Rochester. Like his latest scholar, Carew 



GEORGE HERBERT 147 

made a very pious end ; but the lives of all these men had 
been riotous and sensuous, and their songs were struck 
from their wild lives like the sparks from their rapiers. Of 
a different class, superficially, were the lyrics of Habing- 
ton and of GEORGE Herbert, a devout Catholic gentle- 
man and a mystical Anglican priest. Here there was more 
artifice than in Carew, and less fire. Herbert, in particu- 
lar, is the type of the maker of conceits. Full of deli- 
cate ingenuity, he applies the tortured methods of Donne 
to spiritual experience, gaining more lucidity than his 
master at the expense of a good deal of intensity. But 
Herbert also, in his own field, was a courtier, like the 
lyrists of the Flesh, and he is close to Suckling and the 
other Royalists in the essential temper of his style. He 
was himself a leader to certain religious writers of the next 
generation, whose place is at the close of this chapter. 

The Temple is by far the best-known book of verses of 
the whole school, and it deserves, if hardly that pre-emi- 
nence, yet all its popularity. Herbert has an extraordi- 
nary tenderness, and it is his singular privilege to have 
been able to clothe the common aspirations, fears, and 
needs of the religious mind in language more truly poeti- 
cal than any other Englishman. He is often extravagant^ 
but rarely dull or flat ; his greatest fault lay in an exces- 
sive pseudo-psychological ingenuity, which was a snare 
to all these lyrists, and in a tasteless delight in metrical 
innovations, often as ugly as they were unprecedented. 
He sank to writing in the shape of wings and pillars 
and altars. On this side, in spite, of the beauty of their 
isolated songs and passages, the general decadence of 
the age was apparent in the lyrical writers. There was 
no principle of poetic style recognised, and when the 
spasm of creative passion was over, the dullest mechanism 



148 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

seemed good enough to be adopted. There are whole 
pages of SuckUng and Lovelace which the commonest 
poetaster would now blush to print, and though it may 
be said that few of these writers lived to see their poems 
through the press, and had therefore no opportunity for 
selection, the mere preservation of so much crabbed 
rubbish cannot be justified. 

A w^ord must be spared for Thomas Randolph, a 
'^son" of Ben Jonson, whose early death seems to have 
robbed us of a poet of much solidity and intellectual 
weight. He came nearer, perhaps, than any other man 
of his time to the sort of work that the immediate suc- 
cessors of Malherbe were just then doing in France; he 
may, for purposes of parallelism, be not inaptly styled an 
English Racan. His verse, stately and hard, full of 
thought rather than of charm, is closely modelled on 
the ancients, and inspires respect rather than affection. 
Randolph is a poet for students, and not for the general 
reader ; but he marks a distinct step in the transition 
towards classicism. 

About 1640 there was aii almost simultaneous revival 
of interest in prose throughout the country, and a dozen 
writers of ability adopted this neglected instrument. It 
is not easy to describe comprehensively a class of litera- 
ture which included the suavity of Walton, the rich 
rhetoric of Browne, the arid intelligence of Hobbes, the 
roughness of Milton, and the easy gaiety of Howell. But 
we may feel that the reign of Charles I. lacked a Pascal, 
as that of Elizabeth would have been greatly the better 
for a Calvin. What the prose of England under the Com- 
monwealth wanted was clearness, a nervous limpidity ; 
it needed brevity of phrase, simplicity and facility of dic- 
tion. The very best of our prose-authors of that great and 



CAROLEAN PROSE 149 

uneasy period were apt, the moment they descended from 
their rare heights of eloquence, to sink into prohxity and 
verbiage. In escaping monotony, they became capri- 
cious ; there was an ignorance of law, an insensibility to 
control. The more serious writers of an earher period 
had connived at faults encouraged by the pedantry of 
James I. This second race, of 1640, were less pedantic, 
but still languid in invention, too ready to rest upon the 
ideas of the ancients, and to think all was done when 
these ideas were re-clothed in brocaded language. But as 
we descend we find the earnestness and passion of the 
great struggle for freedom reflected more and more on 
the prose of the best wTiters. The divines became some- 
thing more than preachers ; they became Protestant tri- 
bunes. The evolution of such events as Clarendon 
encountered was bound to create a scientific tendency 
in the writing of history — a tendency diametrically op- 
posed to the '^ sweet raptures and researching conceits" 
which Wotton thought praiseworthy in the long-popular 
Chronicle of Sir Richard Baker (1641). Even style showed 
a marked tendency towards modern forms. At his best 
Walton was as light as Addison, Browne as brilliantly 
modulated as Dr. Johnson, while the rude and naked 
periods of Hobbes directly prepared our language for 
the Restoration. 

Milton as a prose-writer fills us with astonishment. 
The poet who, in Comas, had known how to obtain effects 
so pure, so delicate, and so graceful that verse in England 
has never achieved a more polished amenity, deliberately 
dropped the lyre for twenty years, and came forward as 
a persistent prose pamphleteer of so rude and fierce a 
kind that it requires all our ingenuity to see a relation 
between what he was in 1635 ^^^*^^ ^^^^s, again, in 1641. 



ISO MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Critics have vied with one another in pretending that 
they enjoy the invective tracts of Milton ; they would 
persuade us, as parents persuade children to relish their 
medicine, that the Apology for Smectymnmis is eloquent, 
and Eikouoklastes humorous. But, if we are candid, we 
must admit that these tracts are detestable, whether for 
the crabbed sinuosity of their style, their awkward and un- 
seemly heat in controversy, or for their flat negation of all 
the parts of imagination. If they were not Milton's, we 
should not read one of them. As they are his, we are 
constrained to search for beauties, and we find them in 
the Areopagitica, more than half of which is singularly 
noble, and in certain enthusiastic pages, usually autobio- 
graphical, which form oases in the desert, the howling 
desert, of Milton's other pamphlets. 

Clare;ndon was by a few months Milton's senior, yet 
in reading him we seem to have descended to a later age. 
That he owed not a little to the Theophrastian fashion 
of his youth is certain ; but the real portraits which he 
draws with such picturesque precision are vastly superior 
to any fantastical abstractions of Overbury or Earle. 
Clarendon writes, in Wordsworth's phrase, with his eye 
upon the object, and the graces of his style are the result 
of the necessity he finds of describing what he wishes 
to communicate in the simplest and most convincing 
manner. The History of the Great Rebellion is not the 
work of a student, but of a soldier, an administrator, a 
practical politician in stirring times. To have acted a 
great part publicly and spiritedly is not enough, as we 
are often reminded, to make a man the fit chronicler of 
what he has seen and done ; but in the case of Clarendon 
these advantages were bestowed upon a man who, though 
not a rare artist in words, had a marked capacity for 



JEREMY TAYLOR 151 

expression and considerable literary training. It is his 
great distinction that, living in an age of pedants, he had 
the courage to write history — a species of literature 
which, until his salutary example, was specially over- 
weighted with ornamental learning — in a spirit of com- 
plete simpHcity. The diction of Clarendon is curiously 
modern ; we may read pages of his great book without 
lighting upon a single word now no longer in use. The 
claims of the great Chancellor to be counted among the 
classics of his country were not put forward in the 
seventeenth century, the first instalment of his history 
remaining unprinted until 1752, and the rest of it until 

1759- 

In Jeremy Taylor we reach one of those delightful 
figures, all compact of charm and fascination, which 
tempt the rapid historian to pause for their contem- 
plation. No better words can be used to describe 
him than were found by his friend, George Rust, when 
he said, "This great prelate had the good humour of a 
gentleman, the eloquence of an orator, the fancy of a 
poet, the acuteness of a schoolman, the profoundness of 
a philosopher, the wisdom of a chancellor, the reason of 
an angel, and the piety of a saint. He had devotion 
enough for a cloister, learning enough for a university, 
and wit enough for a college of virtuosi." Fancy was 
the great quality of Taylor, and it covers, as with brocade, 
all parts of the raiment of his voluminous WTitings. His 
was a mind of rare amenity and sweetness ; he was an 
eclectic, and the earliest great divine to free himself 
completely from the subtleties and '^ spinosities " of the 
schools. So graceful are his illustrations and pathetic 
turns of divinity, that his prose lives in its loftier parts as 
no other religious literature of the age does, except, per- 



152 . MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

haps, the verse of George Herbert. Yet even Jeremy 
Taylor suffers from the imperfections of contemporary 
taste. His unction is too long-drawn, his graces too 
elaborate and gorgeous, and modern readers turn from 
the sermons which his own age thought so consummate 
in their beauty to those more colloquial treatises of 
Christian exposition and exhortation of which the Holy 
Living and the Holy Dying are the types. 

We note with particular interest those prose-writers of 
the pre-Restoration period who cultivated the easier and 
more graceful parts of speech and made the transition 
more facile. As a rule, these were not the writers most 
admired in their own age, and Izaak Walton, in par- 
ticular, holds a position now far higher than any which 
he enjoyed in his long lifetime. Yet modern biography 
may almost be said to have begun in those easy, 
garrulous lives of Donne and Wotton which he printed 
in 1640, while in the immortal Complete Angler (1653) we 
still possess the best -written technical treatise in the 
language. Familiar correspondence, too — a delightful 
department of literature — owes much of its freedorn and 
its prestige to the extremely entertaining Epistolce Ho^ 
Eliance (1645), in which James Howell surpassed all 
previous letter-writers in the ease and liveliness of his 
letters. And among these agreeable purveyors of amuse- 
ment, civilisers of that over-serious age, must not be 
omitted Thomas Fuller, indignant as he might have 
been at being classed with persons so frivolous. His 
activity between 1639, when he published the Holy 
Wary and 1661, when he died, was prodigious. With- 
out endorsing the extravagant praise of Coleridge, we 
must acknowledge that the wit of Fuller was amazing, 
if he produced too many examples of it in forms a 



SIR THOMAS BROWN 153 

little too desultory for modern taste. He was all com- 
pact of intellectual vivacity, and his active fancy helped 
him to a thousand images as his pen rattled along. In 
such writers we see the age of the journalist approach- 
ing, although as yet the newspaper, as we under- 
stand it, was not invented. Fuller would have made 
a superb leader-writer, and Howell an ideal special 
correspondent. There was little in either of them of 
the solemnity of the age they lived in, except the long- 
windedness of their sentences. In them we see English 
literature eager to be freed from the last fetters of the 
Renaissance. 

But Sir Thomas Browne hugged those fetters closer 
to himself, and turned them into chased and fretted orna- 
ments of gold. He was one of those rare prose-writers 
whom we meet at intervals in the history of literature, 
who leave nothing to improvisation, but balance and 
burnish their sentences until they reach a perfection 
analogous to that of very fine verse. Supported by his 
exquisite ear, Browne permits himself audacities, neolo- 
gisms, abrupt transitions, which positively take away our 
breath. But while we watch him thus dancing on the 
tight-rope of style, we never see him fall ; if he lets go 
his footing in one place, it is but to amaze us by his agility 
in leaping to another. His Scheme has been supposed 
to be founded on that of Burton, and certainly Browne 
is no less captivated by the humours of melancholy. But 
if Burton is the greater favourite among students, Browne 
is the better artist and the more imaginative writer. 
There is, moreover, much more that is his own, in rela- 
tion to parts adapted from the ancients, than in Burton. 
We find nothing of progress to chronicle in Browne, 
but so much of high, positive beauty that we do not class 



154 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

him in the procession of the writers of his time, but 
award him a place apart, as an author of solitary and 
intrinsic charm. 

On the other hand, a writer far less charming than 
Browne, and now completely obsolete, did serviceable 
work in clarifying and simplifying prose expression, and 
in preparing for the lucidity of the Restoration. Thomas 
HOBBES was the most brilliant pure intelligence between 
Bacon and Locke ; but his metaphysical system is now 
known to have been independent of the former, and 
derived from French sources. His views are embodied 
in his Leviathan (1651), a work of formidable extent, not 
now often referred to except by students, but attractive 
still from the resolute simplicity of the writer's style. In 
the next age, and especially when deism began to de- 
velop, Hobbes exercised a great influence, but this ceased 
when Locke gained the public ear. 

As the century slipped away, English poetry came 
more and more under the spell of a corrupted Petrarch- 
ism. The imitation of Petrarch, seen through Marino 
and Tasso, penetrated all the poetic systems of Western 
Europe. It involved us, in English, in a composite style, 
exquisite and pretentious, simple, at once, and affected. 
A complicated symbolism, such as Donne had inaugu- 
rated, came into almost universal fashion, and verse was 
decomposed by an excess of antithesis, of forced com- 
parisons, of fantastic metaphors. We have seen that, in 
the hands of the dramatists, blank verse, no longer under- 
stood, offered a temptation to loose and languid writing. 
In lyric poetry the rhyme presented some resistance, 
but everything tended to be too fluid and lengthy. The 
poets indulged themselves in a luxurious vocabulary ; like 
the Pleiade, a hundred years earlier, they yearned after 



HERRICK 155 

such words as ^'ocymore, dyspotme, oligochronian." 
Similar defects had been seen in the Alexandrian poets 
of Greece, in Ausonius, in the followers of Tasso; they 
were at that moment rife in the French of the latest 
Ronsardists and in the Spanish of Gongora. These 
dolphin colours are constantly met with in dying litera- 
tures, and the English Renaissance was now at its last 
gasp. 

In the midst of these extravagancies, like Meleager 
winding his pure white violets into the gaudy garland 
of the late Greek euphuism, we find Robert Herrick 
quietly depositing his Hesperides (1648), a volume which 
contained some of the most delicious lyrics in the lan- 
guage. This strange book, so obscure in its own age, 
so lately rediscovered, is a vast confused collection of 
odes, songs, epithalamia, hymns, and epigrams tossed 
together into a superficial likeness to the collected poems 
of Martial, with whom (and not at all with Catullus) 
Herrick had a certain kinship. He was an isolated 
Devonshire clergyman, exiled, now that his youth was 
over, from all association with other men of letters, 
grumbling at his destiny, and disdaining his surround- 
ings, while never negligent in observing them with the 
most exquisite fidelity. The level of Herrick's perform- 
ance is very high when we consider the bulk of it. 
He contrives, almost more than any other poet, to fill 
his lyrics with the warmth of sunlight, the odour of 
flowers, the fecundity of orchard and harvest-field. 
This Christian cleric was a pagan in grain, and in his 
petulant, lascivious love-poems he brings the old rituals 
to the very lych-gate of his church and swings the 
thyrsus under the roof-tree of his parsonage. He 
writes of rustic ceremonies and rural sights with infinite 



156 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

gusto and freshness, bringing up before our eyes at 
every turn little brilliant pictures of the country -life 
around him in Devonshire. Herrick is almost guiltless 
of the complicated extravagance which was rife when 
his single book appeared. 

Crashaw and Vaughan^ on the contrary, were full of 
it, and yet they demiand mention, even in a superficial 
sketch of our poetry, for certain spiritual and literary 
qualities. RICHARD Crashaw, a convert to Catholicism, 
who closed a hectic life prematurely in the service of the 
Holy House at Loretto in 1650, was a student of the 
Spanish and Italian mystics, and, in particular, we cannot 
doubt, of St. John of the Cross. His religious ecstasy 
and anguish take the most bewildering forms, sometimes 
plunging him into Gongorism of the worst description 
(he translated Marino and eclipsed him), but sometimes 
lifting him to transcendental heights of audacious, fiery 
lyricism not approached elsewhere in English- Henry 
Vaughan w^as an Anglican mystic of quite another type, 
delicate, meditative, usually a little humdrum, but every 
now and then flashing out for a line or two into radiant 
intuitions admirably worded. In both there is much 
obscurity to be deplored; but while we cultivate Crashaw 
for the flame belov/ the smoke, we wait in Vaughan for 
the light within the cloud. 

Among the poets we have mentioned, and among the 
great m.ajority of Commonwealth versifiers, there is to be 
traced no attempt to modify any further than Donne had 
essayed to do the prosody which had come into use with 
Spenser and Sidney. But it is now necessary to dwell 
on a phenomenon of paramount importance, the rise of 
a definite revolt against the current system of versifica- 
tion. Side by side with the general satisfaction in the 



WALLER 157 

loosely sinuous verse of the day, there was growing up 
a desire that prosody should be more serried, strenuous, 
neat, and " correct." Excess of licence led naturally to 
a reaction in favour of precision. It was felt desirable 
to pay more attention to the interior harmony of verse, 
to avoid cacophony and what had been considered 
legitimate poetic licences, to preserve grammatical purity 
— in short, to sacrifice common sense and sound judg- 
ment a little less to fancy. Most obvious reform of all, 
it was determined to resist the languid flow of syllables 
from hne to line, but to complete the sense as much 
as possible in a nervous couplet. It has been custom- 
ary to consider this reform as needless and impertinent. 
I am of opinion, on the other hand, that it was not 
merely wholesome but inevitable, if English versification 
was to be preserved from final ruin. It was not until 
more than a century of severe and rigid verse-writing 
by rule had rehabilitated the worn-out instrument of 
metre that it became onee more fitted to produce 
harmonies such as those of Coleridge and Shelley. 

From high up in the seventeenth century careful 
students have detected a tendency towards the smoother 
and correcter, but tamer prosody. I do not think that 
the beginnings of the classical heroic couplet in Eng- 
land can be explored with advantage earlier than in the 
works of Sir John Beaumont, who, dying in 1627, left 
behind him a very carefully written historical poem of 
Bosworth Field. George Sandys, the translator, in the 
course of his extensive travels, seemed to have gained 
French ideas of what the stopped couplet should be. 
But when all claims and candidates have been con- 
sidered, it is really to Edmund Waller that is due the 
'^negative inspiration" (the phrase is borrowed from 



158 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Sainte-Beuve) of closing up within bands of smoothness 
and neatness the wild locks of the British muse. He was 
the English Malherbe, and wrote with the same constitu- 
tional contempt for his predecessors. Dryden accepted 
him as the forerunner of the classic school, and calls him 
^' the first that made writing [verse] easily an art ; first 
showed us how to conclude the sense most commonly 
in distichs." Waller appears to have accepted this reform 
definitely about 1627 (Malherbe's strictly parallel reform 
dates from 1599), and he persisted in it long without 
gaining a single scholar. But in 1642 Sir John Denham 
joined him with his smooth, arid, and prosaic Cooper's 
Hilly and Cowley and Davenant were presently converted. 
These four, then, poets of limited inspiration, are those 
who re-emerge in the next age as the harbingers of 
vigorous prosody and the forerunners of Dryden and 
Pope. 

It is in verse that we can study, far more easily than 
in prose, the crisis in English literature which we have 
now reached. That there is a distinction between the 
manner of Wilkins and of Tillotson, for instance, can be 
maintained and proved, yet to insist upon it might easily 
lead to exaggeration. But no one with an ear or an eye 
can fail to see the difference between Herrick and 
Denham ; it cannot be too strongly affirmed ; it is ex- 
ternal as well as intrinsic, it is a distinction of form as 
well as essence. Denham, to put it otherwise, does not 
very essentially differ as a versifier from such a poet as 
Falconer, who lived one hundred and twenty years later. 
But between him and his exact contemporary Crashaw a 
great gulf is fixed ; they stand on opposite platforms of 
form, of sentiment, of aim. In the years immediately 
preceding the Commonwealth^ literature fell very low in 



ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY 159 

England. But we must not forget that it was a com- 
posite age, an age of variegated experiments and highly 
coloured attempts. One of these deserves a certain 
prominence, more for what it led to than what it was. 

So long as the drama reigned amongst us, prose 
fiction was not likely to flourish, for the novel is a play, 
with all the scenery and the scene-shifting added, written 
for people who do not go to the theatre. But Sidney's 
example was still occasionally followed, and in the 
middle of the seventeenth century the huge romances 
of the French began to be imported into England and 
imitated. The size of the originals may be gathered when 
it is said that one of the most popular, the Cleopdtre of 
Calprenede, is in twenty-three tomes, each containing 
as much as a volume of a Mudie novel. The English 
translations began to be very numerous after 1650, a 
version of the Grand Cyrus ^ in nearly 7000 pages, enjoy- 
ing an immense success in 1653. It is difficult to speak 
of these pompous, chivalric. romances without ridiculing 
them. A sketch of the plot of one reads like a burlesque. 
The original works of the Enghsh imitators of these 
colossal novels are of inferior merit to the original pro- 
ducts of the Rambouillet school ; the unfinished Parthe- 
nissay composed in ''handsome language" by Lord 
Orrery in 1654, is the best known of the former. The 
great vogue of these romances of chivalry was from 1650 
to 1670, after w^hich they were more or less merged in 
the " heroic " plays in rhymed verse which Dryden made 
popular. Their principal addition to literature was an 
attempt to analyse and reproduce the rapid emotional 
changes in the temperament of men and women, thus 
vaguely and blindly preparing the way for the modern 
realistic novel of psychology, and, more directly, for the 



i6o MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

works of Richardson. They were the main secular read- 
ings of Englishwomen during the final decade preceding 
the Restoration, and in their lumbering diffuseness and 
slackness they exemplify, to an almost distressing degree, 
the main errors into which, notwithstanding the genius 
of one or two individuals, and the high ambition of many 
others, English literature had sunken. 

Between 1645 ^^^ 1660 the practice of literature 
laboured under extraordinary disabilities. First among 
these was the concentration of pubHc interest on poHtical 
and religious questions ; secondly, there was the suspi- 
cion and enmity fostered between men, who would other- 
wise have been confreres^ by these difficulties in religion 
and politics ; thirdly, there was the languor consequent 
on the too-prolonged cultivation of one field with the 
same methods. It seems paradoxical to say of an age 
that produced the early verse of Milton and the prose of 
Browne and Jeremy Taylor, that it was far gone in 
decadence ; but these splendid and illuminating excep- 
tions do not prevent the statement from being a correct 
one. England needed, not a few beacons over a waste 
of the waters of ineptitude, but a firm basis of dry land 
on which to build a practicable style for daily service ; 
and to get this the waters had to be drained away, and 
the beautiful beacons extinguished, by the cataclysm of 
the Restoration. 



THE AGE OF DRYDEN 

1660-1700 

The year 1660 provides us with a landmark which is 
perhaps more sahent than any other in the history of 
Enghsh hterature. In most instances the dates with 
which we divide our chronicle are merely approxima- 
tions, points empirically taken to mark the vague transi- 
tion from one age to another. But when Monk went 
down to Dover to welcome the agitated and astonished 
Charles, it was not monarchy only that he received into 
England, but a fresh era in literature and the arts. With 
that act of his, the old English Renaissance, which had 
long been dying, ceased to breathe, and a new departure 
of intellectual civilisation began. Henceforth the ideals 
of the leading minds of England were diametrically 
changed. If they had looked westwards, they now 
looked towards the east. Instantly those men who 
still remained loyal to the Jacobean habit passed out 
of fashion, and even out of notice, while those who had 
foreseen the new order of things, or had been constitu- 
tionally prepared for it, stood out on a sudden as 
pioneers and leaders of the new army of intelligence. 

Before we consider, however, whither that army was 
to march, we must deal with a figure which belonged 
neither to the bankrupt past nor to the flushed and 



1 62 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

animated future. During twenty years Milton, but for 
an occasional sonnet, had said farewell to poetry. Not 
that the power had left him, not that the desire and 
intention of excelling in verse had passed away, but 
because other aspects of life interested him more, and 
because the exact form his great song should ultimately 
take had not impressed itself upon him. Milton per- 
mitted youth and middle age to pass, and remained 
obstinately silent. The Restoration caught him at his 
studies, and exposed him suddenly to acute personal 
danger. Towards merely political opponents Charles II. 
could afford to show himself lenient, and in politics 
there is no evidence that Milton had ever been in- 
fluential. It is customary to think that Milton's official 
position laid him open to resentment, but in the day 
of its triumph the Monarchy could disdain an old paid 
servant of the Parliament, an emeritus -Secretary for 
Foreign Tongues to the Council. What it could less 
easily overlook was the author of Eikonoklastes^ that 
rabid pamphlet in which not only the tenure of kings 
was savagely railed at, but the now sacred image of the 
martyred Charles I. was covered with ignominious ridi- 
cule. Milton's position was not that of Dryden or of 
Waller, who had eulogised Cromwell, and could now 
bow lower still to praise the King. He stood openly 
confessed as one of the most violent of spiritual regicides. 
We might easily have lost our epic supremacy on the 
scaffo-d in August 1660, when the poet was placed so 
ominously in the custody of the Serjeant-at-Arms. It 
seems probable that, to combine two legends, Davenant 
interceded with Morice on hio behalf, and so helpless a 
rebel was contemptuously forgiven. We find him dis- 
charged in December 1660; and when the physical agita- 



MILTON 163 

tions of these first months had passed away, we conceive 
the bhnd man settHng down in peace to his majestic task. 
His vein, he tells us, flowed only from the vernal to the 
autumnal equinox, and in the spring of 1661 the noblest 
single monument of English poetry doubtless began to 
take definite form. ^^ Blind, old, and lonely," as in Shelley's 
vision of him, he was driven from prosperity and ease 
by the triumph of the liberticide, only that he might in 
that crisis become, what else he might have failed to be, 
^' the sire of an immortal strain," ''the third among the 
sons of light." 

There is reason to believe that Milton had already 
determined what should be the form and character 
of his Paradise Lost when Cromwell died. In 1663 he 
completed the poem. Two years later, at Elwood's 
suggestion, " What hast thou to say of Paradise found ? " 
he began the second and the shorter work, which he 
finished in 1665. The choral tragedy of Samson Agonistes 
followed, perhaps in 1667, which was the year of the 
publication of Paradise Lost ; Paradise Regained and 
Samson were printed together in 1671. Three years 
later Milton died, having, so far as is known, refrained 
from the exercise of verse during the last seven years 
of his life. It was, we may believe, practically betvv^een 
1661 and 1667 that he built up the gorgeous triple struc- 
ture on which his fame as that of the first among modern 
heroic poets is perennially sustained. The performances 
of Milton are surprising, yet his reticences are almost 
more amazing still. He sang, when the inspiration was 
on him, "with impetus and cestro,' and when the fit 
was off, could remain absolutely silent for years and 
years. 

The Milton of the Restoration has little affinity with 



1 64 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the lyrical Milton whose work detained us in the last 
chapter. He appears before us now solely in the aspect 
of an epic poet (for the very choruses in Samson are 
scarcely lyrical). He is discovered in these austere and 
magnificent productions, but particularly in Paradise 
Losty as the foremost, and even in a broad sense the 
only epic poet of England. The true epos of the ancient 
literatures had detailed in heroic sequence the achieve- 
ments of the national hero, supported and roused and 
regulated by the immediate intervention of the national 
deities. It had been notable for its elevation, its sim- 
plicity, its oneness of purpose. The various attempts 
to write literary epics in England before Milton's time 
had failed, as they have failed since, and his only models 
were the Iliad and the j^neid ; although it is not to be 
questioned that his conscious design was to do for his 
own country what Tasso, Ariosto, and Camoens, glories of 
the Latin race in the sixteenth century, had done for theirs. 
Those poets had forced the sentiments and aspirations 
of a modern age into the archaic shape of the epos, and 
had produced works Vv^hich did not much resemble, in- 
deed, the Iliad or the Odyssey ^ but which glorified Itahan 
or Portuguese prowess, flattered the national idiosyn- 
crasy, and preserved the traditional extent and something 
of the traditional form of the ancient epic. 

There was, however, another great predecessor to 
whom, in the general tenor of his epic, Milton stood in 
closer relation than to the ancients or to the secular 
moderns. The one human production which we occa- 
sionally think of in reading Paradise Lost is the Divine 
Comedy. In Milton, as in Dante, it is not the prowess of 
any national hero which gives the poem its central in- 
terest, but the sovereign providence of God. Dante, how- 



MILTON 165 

ever, was emboldened, by the circumstances of his epoch 
and career, to centre the interest of his great trilogy in 
present times, giving, indeed, to a theme in essence highly 
imaginative, and as we should say fabulous, an air of 
actuality and realism. Milton touches modern existence 
now^here, but is sustained throughout on a vision of stu- 
pendous supernatural action far away in the past, before 
and during the very dawn of humanity. Such a story as 
Paradise Lost communicates to us could be credible and 
fascinating only to persons who had taken in the mys- 
teries of the Hebrew Bible with their mother's miilk, and 
who were as familiar with Genesis as with the chronicles 
of their own country. The poem presupposes a homely 
knowledge of and confidence in the scheme of the Old 
Testament, and in this sense, though perhaps in this 
sense only, those are right who see in Paradise Lost a 
characteristically ^^ puritan" poem. If we take a Puritan 
to be a man steeped in Bible lore, then we may say that 
only '^ puritans " can properly appreciate the later poems 
of Milton, although there is much in the texture of these 
works which few Puritans, in the exacter sense, would, if 
they understood it, tolerate. It is a very notable fact 
that the only English epic is also the only epic taken 
from Biblical sources. So great has been the force of 
Milton that he has stamped on English eyes the picture 
he himself created of the scenes of Genesis, and Huxley 
complained that it was the seventh book of Paradise Losty 
and not any misreading of Moses, which had imprinted 
indehbly on the English public mind its system of a false 
cosmogony. 

The Fall and the Redemption of Man were themes of 
surpassing interest and importance, but at the first blush 
they might seem highly improper for lengthy treatment 



1 66 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in blank verse. We shudder to think how they would 
have been dealt with by some of Milton's sterner co- 
religionists — how in Milton's youth they had been 
treated, for instance, by Sylvester and by Quarles. 
But it is necessary to insist that Milton stood not 
closer, intellectually, to such a divine as Baxter than he 
did to, let us say, such a seriously minded lay-church- 
man as Cowley. He was totally separated from either, 
and in all aesthetic questions was, happily for us, a law 
unto himself. Hence he allowed himself a full exercise 
of the ornaments with which his humanistic studies had 
enriched him. His brain was not an empty conventicle, 
stored with none but the necessities of devotion : it was 
hung round with the spoils of paganism and garlanded 
with Dionysiac ivy. Within the walls of his protesting 
contemporaries no music had been permitted but that of 
the staidest psalmody. In the chapel of Milton's brain, 
entirely devoted though it was to a Biblical form of wor- 
ship, there were flutes and trumpets to accompany one 
v:ist commanding organ. The peculiarity of Milton's 
position was that among Puritans he was an artist, and 
yet among artists a Puritan. 

Commentaries abound on the scheme, the theology, 
the dogmatic ideas of Paradise Lost and Regamed. 
These, it may boldly be suggested, would scarcely in 
these days be sufficient to keep these epics alive, were 
it not for the subsidiary enchantments of the very orna- 
ment which to grave minds may at first have seemed 
out of place. Dryden, with his admirable perspicuity, 
early perceived that it was precisely where the language 
of the Authorised Version trammelled him too much 
that Milton failed, inserting what Dryden calls ^' a track 
of scripture " into the text. It is where he escapes from 



MILTON 167 

Scriptural tradition that the grandiose or vohiptuous 
images throng his fancy^ and the melody passes from 
stop to stop; from the reed-tone of the bowers of Para- 
dise to the open diapason of the council of the rebel 
angels. As he grew older the taste of Milton grew more 
austere. The change in the character of his ornament is 
deeply marked when we ascend from the alpine meadows 
of Paradise Lost to the peaks of Paj-adise Regained^ where 
the imaginative air is so highly rarefied that many readers 
find it difficult to breathe. Internal evidence may lead 
us to suppose Samson Agonistes to be an even later 
manifestation of a genius that was rapidly rising into 
an atmosphere too thin for human enjoyment. Milton 
had declared; in a sublime utterance of his early life, 
that the highest poetry was not ^^ to be obtained by the 
invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughters/' 
but by the direct purification of divine fire placed on 
the lips of the elect by the hallowed fingers of the 
seraphim. That inspiration, he did not question, ulti- 
mately came to him, and in its light he wrote. But we 
do him no dishonour after these years if we confess that 
he owed more of his charm than he acknowledged to the 
aid of those siren daughters. He was blind, and could 
not refresh the sources of memory, and by-and-by the 
sirens, like his own earthly daughters, forsook him, leav- 
ing him in the dry and scarce-tolerable isolation of his 
own integral dignity. Without his ineffable charm the 
Milton of these later poems would scarcely be readable, 
and that charm consists largely in two elements — his 
exquisite use of pagan or secular imagery, and the un- 
equalled variety and harmony of his versification. 

The blank verse of the epics has been at once the 
model and the despair of all who have attempted that 



1 68 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

easiest and hardest of measures since the end of the 
seventeenth century. On his manipulation of this form 
Milton founds his claim to be acknowledged the greatest 
artist or artificer in verse that the English race has pro- 
duced. The typical blank iambic line has five full and 
uniform stresses, such as we find in correct but timid 
versifiers throughout our literature. All brilliant writers 
from Shakespeare downwards have shown their mastery 
of the form by the harmonious variation of the number 
and value of these stresses ; but Milton goes much 
further in this respect than any other poet, and, with- 
out ever losing his hold upon the norm, plays with it as 
a great pianist plays with an air. His variations of 
stress, his inversions of rhythm, what have been called 
his ^' dactylic" and ^^ trochaic" effects, add immeasurably 
to the freshness and beauty of the poem. When we 
read Paradise Lost aloud, we are surprised at the absence 
of that monotony which mars our pleasure in reading 
most other works of a like length and sedateness. No 
one with an ear can ever have found Milton dull, and 
the prime cause of this perennial freshness is the amaz- 
ing art with which the blank verse is varied. It leaps 
like water from a spring, always in the same direction 
and volume, yet never for two consecutive moments in 
exactly the same form. 

To us the post-Restoration writings of Milton possess 
a greater value than all else that was produced in verse 
for more than a hundred years ; but in taking an his- 
torical survey we must endeavour to realise that his 
influence on the age. he lived in was nil, and that to 
unprejudiced persons of education living in London 
about 1665, the author of Paradise Lost was something 
less than Flecknoe or Flatman. Nor to us, who see 



MILTON 169 

beneath the surface, does he present any features which 
bring him into the general movement of Hterature. He 
was a species in himself — a vast, unrelated Phoenix. In 
his youth, as we have seen, Milton had been slightly 
subjected to influences from Shakespeare, Spenser, and 
even the disciples of Spenser ; but after his long silence 
he emerges with a style absolutely formed, derived from 
no earlier poet, and destined for half a century to influence 
no later one. Critics amuse themselves by detecting in 
Paradise Lost relics of Du Bartas, of Vondel, of Cowley, 
even of lesser men ; but these were mere fragments of 
ornament disdainfully transferred to Milton's magnifi- 
cent edifice as material, not as modifying by a jot the 
character of its architecture. It is very strange to think 
of the aged Milton, in stately patience, waiting for death 
to come to him in his relative obscurity, yet not doubting 
for a moment that he had succeeded in that ^^ accom- 
plishment of greatest things " to which his heart had 
been set at Cambridge more than forty years before. 

We turn from Milton, then, wrapped like Moses in a 
cloud, and the contrast is great when we concentrate 
our attention on the state of letters in England around 
the foot of his mountain ; for here, at least, there was no 
isolation, but a combined unison of effort in a single 
direction was the central feature of the moment. During 
the strenuous political agitation of the Commonwealth, 
literature had practically come to an end in England. 
There were still, of course, men of talent, but they were 
weak, discouraged, unilluminated. Some were trying to 
keep alive, in its utter decrepitude, the Jacobean method 
of writing ; others were looking ahead, and were ready, 
at the cost of what capricious beauty remained in English 
verse, to inaugurate a new school of reason and correct- 



170 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ness. When 1660 brought back the Court, with its Latin 
sympathies, the first of these two classes faded Hke ghosts 
at cockcrow. Herrick, Shirley, Vaughan long survived 
the Restoration, but no notice of them or of their writings 
is to be found in any of the criticisms of the age. On 
the other hand, the second class came forth at once 
into prominence, and four small poets — Waller, with his 
precise grace ; Denham, with his dry vigour ; Davenant, 
who restored the drama ; Cowley, who glorified intellect 
and exact speculation — were hailed at once as the masters 
of a new school and the martyrs to a conquered bar- 
barism. It was felt, in a vague way, that they had been 
holding the fort, and theirs were the honours of a relieved 
and gallant garrison. 

The Commonwealth, contemplating more serious 
matters, had neglected and discouraged literature. The 
monarchy, under a king who desired to be known as a 
patron of wit, should instantly have caused it to flourish ; 
but for several years after 1660 — why, we can hardly tell 
— scarcely anything of the least value was composed. The 
four poets just enumerated, in spite of the fame they had 
inherited, wrote none but a few occasional pieces down to 
the deaths of Cowley (1667) and Davenant (1668). There 
was a general consciousness that taste had suffered a re- 
volution, but what direction it was now to take remained 
doubtful. The returning cavaliers had brought the 
message back from France that the savagery of English 
letters was to cease, but something better than Davenant's 
plays or even Cowley's odes must surely take its place. 
The country was eager for guidance, yet without a guide. 
No one felt this more perspicuously than the youthful 
Dryden, who described his own position long afterwards 
by saying that in those days he ^^was drawing the out- 



FRENCH INFLUENCES 171 

lines of an art without any living master to instruct " him 
in it. 

The guidance had to come from France, and the 
moment of the Restoration was not a fortunate one. 
The first great generation after Malherbe was drawing to 
a close, and the second had not quite begun. The de- 
velopment of English literature might have been steadier 
and purer, if the exiled English courtiers had been kept 
in Paris ten years longer, to witness the death of Mazarin, 
the decay of the old Academic coterie, and the rise of 
Boileau and Racine. They left Chapelain behind them, 
and returned home to find Cowley — poets so strangely 
similar in their merits and in their faults, in their ambi- 
tions and in their failures, that it is hard to believe the 
resemblance wholly accidental. They had left poetry in 
France dry, harsh, positive, and they found it so in Eng- 
land. The only difference was that on this side of the 
Channel there was less of it, and that it was conducted 
here with infinitely less vigour, resource, and abundance. 
There was no Corneille in London, no Rotrou ; the 
authority of Waller was late and feeble in comparison 
with that bequeathed by Malherbe. 

It was, nevertheless, important to perceive, and the 
acutest Englishmen of letters did at once perceive, that 
what had been done in France about thirty years before 
was now just being begun in England ; that is to say, the 
old loose romantic manner, say of Spenser or of Ronsard, 
was being totally abandoned in favour of " the rules," the 
unities, a closer prosody, a drier, exacter system of 
reasoning. Unfortunately, up to 1660 there was little real 
criticism of poetic style in France, and little effort to be 
dexterously complete all through a composition. Happy 
lines, a brilliant passage, had to excuse pages of flatness and 



172 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ineptitude. So it was in England. A few single lines of 
Cowley are among the most beautiful of the century, and 
he has short jets of enchanting poetry, but these lie scat- 
tered in flat wildernesses of what is intolerably grotesque. 
The idea of uniform excellence was to be introduced, 
directly in France and then incidentally here, by Boileau, 
who was writing his first great satires when Charles II. 
was in the act of taking possession of his throne. 

Even in these first stumbling days, however, the new 
school saw its goal before it. The old madness, the old 
quaint frenzy of fancy, the old symbolism and impres- 
sionism had utterly gone out. In their place, in the place 
of this liberty which had turned to licence, came the 
rigid following of '* the ancients." The only guides for 
English verse in future were to be the pole-star of the 
Latin poets, and the rules of the French critics who 
sought to adapt Aristotle to modern life. What such a 
poet as Dryden tried to do was regulated by what, read- 
ing in the light of Scaliger and Casaubon, he found the 
Latins had done. This excluded prettiness altogether, 
excluded the extravagances and violent antics of the 
natural school, but admitted, if the poet was skilful 
enough to develop them, such qualities as nobility of 
expression, lucidity of language, justice of thought, and 
closeness of reasoning, and these are the very qualities 
which we are presently to discern in Dryden. 

Meanwhile, although poetry, in the criticism of poetry, 
was the subject uppermost in the minds of the men of 
wit and pleasure who clustered around the Court of 
Charles, attention was paid, and with no little serious- 
ness, to the deplorable state of prose. Here the distinc- 
tion between old and new could not be drawn with as 
much sharpness as it could in verse, yet here also there 



THE ROYAL SOCIETY 173 

was a crisis imminent. The florid^ involved, and often 
very charming prose of such writers as Jeremy Taylor, 
Fuller, and Henry More, was naturally destined to be- 
come obsolete. Its long-windedness, its exuberance, its 
caprices of style, marked it out for speedy decay ; its 
beauties, and they have been already dwelt upon, were 
dolphin colours. A time had come when what people 
craved in prose was something simpler and terser in 
form, less ornate, less orotund, more supple in deahng 
with logical sequences of ideas. England had produced 
several divines, essayists, and historians of great dis- 
tinction, but she had hitherto failed to bring forth a 
Pascal. 

The returning Royalists had left behind them in Paris 
an Academy which, with many faults, had yet for a 
quarter of a century been a great power for good in 
France. It had held up a standard of literature, had 
enforced rules, had driven the stray sheep of letters into 
something resembling a flock. The first important step 
taken in intellectual life after the Restoration was the 
foundation in England of a body which at its initiation 
seemed more or less closely to resemble the French 
Academy. In 1661 Cowley had issued his Proposition 
for the Advancement of Learning^ the direct result of 
which was the institution of the Royal Society in 1662, 
with the King as patron, and Lord Brouncker, the mathe- 
matician, as first president. Cowley's tract was merely 
the match which set fire to a scheme which had lor.i^ 
been preparing for the encouragement of experiment..! 
knowledge. As every one is aware, the Royal Society 
soon turned its attention exclusively to the exacter 
sciences, but most of the leading English poets and prose- 
writers were among its earlier members, and it does 



174 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

not seem to have been observed by the historians of 
our literature that the original scope of the assembly in- 
cluded the renovation of English prose. According to 
the official definition of the infant Royal Society, they 
^^ exacted from all their members a close, naked, natural 
way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a 
native easiness, bringing all things as near the mathe- 
matical plainness as they can," and passed ^^ a resolution 
to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of 
style." No literary Academy could have done more; and 
although the Royal Society soon dropped all pretensions 
to jurisdiction over prose-writing, this early action, coming 
when it did, can but have been of immense service to the 
new school. Nor must it be forgotten that among these 
savants who bound themselves to the exercise of lucidity 
and brevity in composition were Boyle, Clarendon^ 
Barrow, Evelyn, Pearson, Pepys, Stanley, Burnet, the 
very representatives of all that was most vivid in the 
prose of the age. Of these not all survived to learn the 
lesson that they taught,, but it is therefore, perhaps, the 
more significant that they should have accepted it in 
principle. 

In all this movement John Dryden's place was still 
insignificant. In his thirtieth year he was, as a later 
Laureate put it, faintly distinguished. But he was pre- 
sently to find his opportunity in the resuscitation of 
dramatic poetry. From before the death of Ben Jonson 
the sta^e had begun to languish, and Its^ decline cannot 
in fairness be attributed entirely to the zeal of the 
Puritans. But in 1641 Parliament had issued an ordi- 
nance ordaining that public stage -plays should cease, 
those who had been in the habit of indulging in these 
spectacles of lascivious pleasure being sternly recom- 



THE REVIVAL OF THE DRAMA 175 

mended to consider repentance^ reconciliation, and peace 
with God. This charge being found insufficient, an Act 
was passed in 1648 ordering that all theatres should 
be dismantled, all convicted actors publicly whipped, 
and all spectators fined. An attempt to perform the 
Bloody Brother of Fletcher merely proved that the 
authorities were in deadly earnest, for the actors 
were carried off to prison in their stage clothes. The 
drama is a form of art which cannot exist in a vacuum ; 
starved of all opportunities of exercise, English play- 
writing died of inanition. Nothing could be more abjectly 
incompetent and illiterate than the closet-dramas printed 
during the Commonwealth. Men who had not seen a 
play for twenty years had completely forgotten what a 
play should be. It is scarcely credible that an art which 
had been raised to perfection by Shakespeare, should in 
half a century sink into such an abysm of feebleness as we 
find, for example, in the unacted dramas of the Killigrews. 
Nor did a spark of poetry, however wild and vague, 
survive in these degenerate successors of the school of 
Fletcher. 

In the midst of this extremity of decay the theatres 
were once more opened. In 1656 Sir John Davenant 
ventured to invite the public to ^^ an entertainment by 
declamation and music, after the manner of the ancients," 
at Rutland House, in the City. This was the thin end of the 
wedge indeed ; but it has been wrongly described as a play, 
or even an opera. There was no dialogue, but extremely 
long rhapsodies in prose (which must surely have been 
read) were broken by songs and instrumental music. 
As no harm came of this experiment, in 1658 Davenant 
dared to open the old dismantled Cockpit in Drury Lane, 
and there produced his English opera, the Siege of Rhodes , 



176 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

which had been akeady seen at Rutland House. This 
dramatic production, afterwards greatly enlarged, was 
prodigiously admired in the Court of Charles H., and 
was looked upon as the starting-point of the new drama. 
The critics of the Restoration are never tired of applaud- 
ing this ^' perfect opera/' the versification of which was 
smooth and ingeniously varied indeed, yet without a 
touch of even rhetorical poetry. As nothing befell the 
daring Davenant, he was emboldened to bring out 
five-act plays, tragedies and comedies of his own, at 
Drury Lane, and, almost immediately after the King's 
return, patents were granted both to him and to Killigrew. 
In Betterton, Harris, and Mrs. Sanderson (for women 
now first began to take w^omen's parts) a school of young 
actors was presently discovered, and the stage flourished 
again as if Puritanism had never existed. 

But it was one thing to have clever actors and a pro- 
tected stage, and quite another to create a dramatic 
literature. It might be very well for enthusiastic con- 
temporaries to say that in his plays Davenant '^ does out- 
do both ancients and the moderns too," but these were 
simply execrable as pieces of writing. The long silence 
of the Commonwealth weighed upon the playwrights. 
Only one man in this first period wrote decently, a robust, 
vigorous imitator of Ben Jonson, John Wilson, whose 
comedies and tragedies reproduced the manner of that 
master with remarkable skill. This, however, proved to 
be a false start. The new drama was no more to spring 
from the study of Ben Jonson than from a dim reminis- 
cence of Shakespeare and Fletcher. It was to come 
from France, and mainly from Corneille. The old, 
almost simultaneous translation of the Cid, by Joseph 
Rutter, was forgotten; but in the years just preceding 



DRYDEN 177 

the Restoration Sir William Lower had published a 
series of versions of Corneille's tragedies, and these had 
been widely admired. In his attempts at lyrical drama, 
Davenant was undoubtedly imitating not Corneille only, 
but Quinault. Early in his critical career, Dryden 
announced that the four great models were Aristotle, 
Horace, Ben Jonson, and Corneille ; and though he 
refers vaguely and largely to the dramatists of Italy 
and Spain, fearing by too great praise of a French- 
man to wound English susceptibilities, it is plain that 
Dryden in his early tragedies is always eagerly watching 
Corneille. 

In that valuable and admirable treatise. An Essay of 
Dramatic Poesy ^ 1668, published w^hen he had already 
produced five of his dramatic experiments, Dryden very 
clearly and unflinchingly lays down the law about thea- 
trical composition. Plays are for the future to be ^^ regu- 
lar" — that is to say, they are to respect the unities of time, 
place, and action ; '^no theatre in the world has anything 
so absurd as the English tragi-comedy," and this is to be 
rigorously abandoned ; a great simplicity of plot, a broad 
and definite catastrophe, an observation of the laws of 
stage decorum, these are to mark the English theatre in 
future, as they already are the ornament of the French. 
After all this, we are startled to discover Dryden turning 
against his new allies, praising the English irregularity, 
finding fault with Corneille, and finally unravelling his 
whole critical web with a charming admission : '' I ad- 
mire the pattern of elaborate writing, but — I love Shake- 
speare." The fact is that the great spirit of Dryden, here 
at the practical outset of his career, was torn between 
two aims. He saw that English poetry was exhausted, 
disillusioned, bankrupt, and that nothing short of a com- 



178 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

plete revolution would revive it ; he saw that the Latin 
civilisation was opening its arms, and that England was 
falling into them, fascinated like a bird by a snake (and 
Dryden also w^as fascinated and could not resist) ; yet, 
all the time, he was hankering after the lost poetry, and 
wishing that a compromise could be made between 
Shakespeare and Aristotle, Fletcher and MoUere. So, 
with all his effort to create " heroic drama " in England, 
no really w^ell-constructed piece, no closely wrought and 
highly polished Cinna^N-^s to reward Dryden for his culti- 
vation of the unities. 

He could not, of course, foresee this, and the success 
which followed his suggestion, made in 1664, that '^ the 
excellence and dignity of rhyme " should be added to 
serious drama, must have made him look upon him- 
self as a great and happy innovator. Etheredge, in the 
graver scenes of his Comical Revenge^ instantly adopted 
the rhyming couplet, Dryden's ow^n tragedies followed, 
and blank verse was completely abandoned until 1678. 
During these fourteen years, Sedley, Crowne, Settle, 
Otway, and Lee, in succession between 1668 and 1675, 
came to the front as industrious contributors to the 
tragic stage, each, with a touching docility, accepting 
the burden of rhyme ; we therefore possess a solid 
mass of dramatic literature, much of it quite skilful in 
its own way, produced in a form closely analogous to 
that of the French. These are what were known as the 
'' heroic plays," of which Dryden's Conquest of Granada is 
the type. This strange experiment has received from the 
critics of more recent times little but ridicule, and it may 
be admitt-d that it is not easy to approach it with sym- 
pathy. Still, certain facts should make it important to 
the literary historian. The taste for heroic drama showed 



DRYDEN 179 

a singularly literary preoccupation on the part of the 
public. To listen to the '^cat and puss" dialogue, the 
aTL^ofjLvOia, required a cultivated attention, and the ear 
which delighted in the richness of the rhyme could 
hardly be a vulgar one. 

The advantages of the system lay in the elegance and 
nobility of the impression of life, the melody of the 
versification ; its disadvantages were that it encouraged 
bombast and foppery, and was essentially monotonous. 
All was magnificent in those plays ; the main personages 
were royal, or on the steps of the throne. The heroic 
plays demanded a fuller stage presentment than the 
age might supply. If the Indian Emperor could now be 
acted under the management of Mr. Imre Karalfy, we 
should probably be charmed with the sonorous splendour 
of its couplets and the gorgeous ritual of its scenes. The 
Rehearsal (1672), with its delicious fooling, only added to 
the popular predilection for these royal tragedies. But 
Dryden, who had invented them, grew tired of them, and 
in All for Love, in 1678, he 'disencumbered himself from 
rhyme." The whole flock of tragic poets immediately 
followed him, and heroic plays were an exploded 
fashion. 

If we turn to these ponderous tragedies now, it is 
principally, however, to study the essays which are 
prefixed to them. In the general interest awakened 
concerning the technique of literature, these were fre- 
quent ; Lestrange, whose business it was to read them, 
complained that '^a man had as good go to court with- 
out a cravat as appear in print without a preface." But 
Dryden's, composed, perhaps, in rivalry with the Examcns 
of Corneille, are by far the most important, and form 
the first body of really serious and philosophical criti- 



i8o MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

cism to be discovered in English. We must not expect 
absolute consistency in these essays. They mark the 
growth of a mind, not the conditions of a mind settled 
in a fixed opinion. As fresh lights came up on his horizon, 
as he read Ben Jonson less and Shakespeare more, as 
Boileau and Bossu affected his taste, as Racine rose into 
his ken, and as he became more closely acquainted with 
the poets of antiquity, Dryden's views seem to vacillate, 
to be lacking in authority. But we err if this remains 
our final opinion ; we mistake the movement of growth 
for the instability of weakness. To the last Dryden was 
a living force in letters, spreading, progressing, stimu- 
lating others by the ceaseless stimulus which he himself 
received from literature. 

And while we study these noble critical prefaces we 
perceive that English prose has taken fresh forms and a 
new coherency. Among the many candidates for the 
praise of having reformed our wild and loose methods 
in prose, John Evelyn seems to be the one who best 
deserves it. He was much the oldest of the new writers, 
and he was, perhaps, the very earliest to go deliberately 
to French models of brevity and grace. Early in 
the Commonwealth he was as familiar with La Motte 
le Vayer as with Aristotle ; he looked both ways and 
embraced all culture. Yet Evelyn is not a great writer ; 
he aims at more than he reaches ; there is notable in his 
prose, as in the verse of Cowley, constant irregularity of 
workmanship, and a score of faults have to be atoned for 
by one startling beauty. Evelyn, therefore, is a pioneer ; 
but the true artificers of modern English prose are a 
group of younger men of divers fortunes, all, strangely 
enough, born between 1628 and 1633. In genealogical 
order the names of the makers of modern style may be 



TILLOTSON i8i 

given thus — Temple, Barrow^ Tillotson, Halifax, Dryden, 
Locke, and South. 

Among these, the tradition of the eighteenth century 
gave the first place to John Tillotson, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, whose influence on his contemporaries, and 
particularly on Dryden, was supposed to be extreme. 
Later criticism has questioned the possibility of this, 
and, indeed, it can be demonstrated that until after he 
was raised to the primacy in 1691 the publications of 
Tillotson were scattered and few ; he seemed to with- 
draw from notice behind the fame of such friends as 
Barrow and Wilkins. But it must not be forgotten that 
all this time Tillotson was preaching, and that as early as 
1665 his sermons were accepted as the most popular of 
the age. The clergy, we are told, came to his Tues- 
day lectures '^to form their minds," and if so, young 
writers may well have attended them to form their 
style. The celebrated sweetness of Tillotson's char- 
acter is reflected in his works, where the storms and 
passions of his career seem to have totally subsided. 
Urbanity and a balanced decorum are found throughout 
the serene and insinuating periods of this elegant lati- 
tudinarian. It was said of him that ^^ there never was a 
son of absurdity that did not dislike, nor a sensible reader 
who did not approve his writings." He was a typical 
child of the Restoration, in that, not having very much 
to say, he was assiduous in saying what he had in the 
most graceful and intelligible manner possible. 

By the side of Tillotson, Isaac Barrow appears pon- 
derous and even long-winded. He belongs to the new 
school more by what. he avoids than by what he attains. 
He was a man of great intellectual force, who, born into 
an age which was beginning to stigmatise certain faults 



1 82 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in its predecessor, was able to escape those particular 
errors of false ornament and studied quaintness, but 
could not train his somewhat elephantine feet to dance on 
the tight-rope of delicate ease. The matter of Barrow is 
always solid and virile, and he has phrases of a delightful 
potency. In considering the place of the great divines 
in the movement of literature, it is to be borne in mind 
that sermons were now to a vast majority of auditors 
their principal intellectual pabulum. In days when 
there were no newspapers, no magazines, no public 
libraries, and no popular lectures, when knowledge was 
but sparsely distributed in large and costly books, all 
who w^ere too decent to encounter the rough speech and 
lax morality of the theatre had no source of literary 
entertainment open to them except the churches. We 
groan nowadays under the infliction of a long sermon, 
but in the seventeenth century the preacher who stopped 
within the hour defrauded an eager audience of a plea- 
sure. It is not necessary to suppose that with the decay 
of puritanical enthusiasm the appetite for listening to 
sermons came to an end. On the contrary, public taste 
became more eclectic, and a truly popular divine was 
more than ever besieged in his pulpit. To these condi- 
tions the preachers lent themselves, and those who had 
literary skill revelled in opportunities which were soon 
to quit them for the essayist and the journalist. Nor 
was the orthodoxy of the hour so strenuous that it 
excluded a great deal of political and social allusion. 
Sermons and books of divinity were expected to enter- 
tain. There are few treatises of the age so lively as 
the religious pamphlets of the unidentified author of 
the Whole Duty of Man, and it was an appreciator 
of the wicked wit of South who protested that his 



TEMPLE 183 

addresses should be called, not Sunday, but week-day 
sermons. 

From the rapid and luminous compositions of the 
divines, it was but a step to the masters of elegant mun- 
dane prose. Cruel commentators have conspired to 
prove that there was no subject on w^hich Sir William 
Temple was so competent as to excuse the fluency with 
which he wrote about it. That the matter contained in 
the broad volumes of his Works is not of great extent or 
value must be conceded; but st3de does not live by matter 
only, and it is the bright modern note, the ease and 
grace, the rapidity and lucidity, that give to Temple his 
faint but perennial charm. He is the author, too, of one 
famous sentence, which may be quoted here, although 
our scope forbids quotation, because it marks in a very 
clear way the movement of English prose. Let us 
listen to the cadence of these words : 

" ]Vhe?i all is do?ie^ human life is, at the greatest and the best, 
but L ke a froward child, that must be played with and humoured a 
little to keep it qiciet till it falls asleep, a7id the7i the care is overP 

This is the modern manner of using English. It is 
divided by an abysm from the prose of the Common- 
wealth, and in writing such a sentence Temple showed 
himself nearer to the best authors of our living age than 
he was to such contemporaries of his own as Hobbes or 
Browne. 

Of all those, however, who contrived to clarify and 
civilise the prose of the Restoration, and to make it a 
vehicle for gentle irony and sparkling humour, the most 
notable was ^^ Jotham, of piercing wit and pregnant 
thought." There exists some tiresome doubt about the 
bibliography of the Marquis of Halifax, for his anony- 



1 84 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

mous miscellanies were not collected until 1704, when 
he had been nine years dead. But no one questions the 
authenticity of Advice to a Daughter ; and if internal 
evidence, proof by style and temper, are worth anything 
at all, they must confirm the tradition that it is to the 
same pen we owe the Character of a Trimmer and the 
Anatomy of an Equivalent. In these ironic tracts, so 
adroit, so grave, so graceful, we find ourselves far indeed 
from the storm and turmoil of the Commonwealth. In 
Halifax w^e see the best and the most sympathetic side 
of the Restoration, its conservative scepticism, its reserve, 
its urbane and moderate virtue. In a letter to Cotton, 
Halifax confesses that his favourite reading had always 
been Montaigne, and he is a link between that delicious 
essayist and the Spectators and Tatlers of a later age. 

It was characteristic of the new age, anxious to fix the 
grounds of opinion and base thought in each province 
exactly, that it should turn to the phenomena of the 
human mind and inquire into the sources of knowledge. 
This work fell particularly to the share of that candid 
and independent philosopher John Locke, and the cele- 
brated Essay on the Human Understanding (1690), in 
which he elaborates the thesis that all knowledge is 
derived from experience, marks a crisis in psychological 
literature. Locke derived all our ideas from sensation 
and reflection, believing the mind to be a passive 
recipient of simple ideas, which it cannot in the first 
instance create, but can retain, and can so modify and 
multiply as to form that infinity of complex ideas which 
we call the Understanding. In short, he protested against 
the empirical doctrine of ^' innate notions " being brought 
into the world by the soul. Where Locke's method and 
teaching, however, were peculiarly useful were in their 



LOCKE 185 

admirable challenge to those pedantic assumptions and 
baseless propositions which had up to his time disturbed 
philosophy. Locke refuses to parley with the obscurities 
of the schools, and he sits bravely in the dry and search- 
ing light of science. 

Locke's contributions to theology are m.arked by the 
same intense determination to arrive at truth, and he was 
accused of having been the unconscious father of the 
deists. But, in fact, in religion, as in philosophy, his 
attitude is not so much sceptical as scrupulous. He 
ardently desires to get rid of the dubious and the non- 
essential. His candour is not less displayed in his trac- 
tates on education and government. Everywhere Locke 
is the embodiment of enlightened common-sense, tolera- 
tion, and clairvoyance. He laid his hand on the jarring 
chords of the seventeenth century, and sought to calm 
and tune them, and in temperament, as in influence, he 
was the inaugurator of a new age of thought and feeling. 
He was the most liberally-minded man of his time, and 
in his modesty, candour, and charity, no less than in the 
astounding reverberations caused by his quiet philoso- 
phical utterances, Locke reminds us of Charles Darwin. 
As a writer he is not favourably represented by the 
Essay f which is arid in form, and at no time was he in 
possession of an attractive style ; but in some of his 
more familiar treatises we see how lucid and simple 
he could be at his best, and how completely he had 
exchanged the ornate manner of the Commonwealth for 
a prose that was competent to deal with plain matters 
of fact. 

We dwell, more or less lovingly, on these names of 
the precursors of a modern prose, yet not one of them, 
not Halifax, not Tillotson, not Temple, survives as the 
13 



1 86 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

author of any book now generally read by the larger 
public. Even the Prefaces of Dryden, it must regretfully 
be admitted, are no longer familiar to any but literary 
readers. The Restoration prose most effectively appre- 
ciated by the masses, and still alive on the shelves of the 
booksellers, is that of writers never recognised at all by 
the polite criticism of their own day. In a country book- 
shop you shall no longer happen upon the Sacred Theory 
of the Earth or upon Public Employment preferred to 
Solitude^ but you shall upon Pepys' Diary and the 
Pilgrinis Progress and A Call to the Unconverted, 

These works do not stand on the same or even on 
neighbouring levels of literary merit ; but they have this 
in common, that neither Baxter nor Bunyan nor Pepys 
set any value on literature, or concerned himself at all with 
the form under which he transmitted his ideas. There was 
this difference, however, that while Bunyan was uncon- 
sciously a consummate artist and a man instinct with 
imagination, the other two impress us solely by the strik- 
ing quality of the narrative, or the exhortations which 
they impart in the first words that occur to them. It is 
to John Bunyan, therefore, that our attention must here 
for a moment be given. Like Milton, he was an ana- 
chronism in the age of Charles II., and we observe with 
surprise that it was in an epoch of criticism, of reason, 
of combined experimental eclecticism, that two isolated 
men of genius put forth, the one an epic poem, the other 
a couple of religious allegories, steeped in the purest and 
most ideal romance, and each unrivalled in its own class 
throughout other and more propitious ages of English 
literature. Nor, though the simple, racy compositions 
of Bunyan may not seem to have had any very direct 
influence on literature of the more academic kind, has 



BUNYAN 187 

the stimulus of his best books on humble minds ceased 
ever since, but has kept the language of the poor always 
hardy and picturesque, with scarcely less instant benefit 
than the Bible itself. Whether these narratives, and, most 
of all, the Life and Death of Mr, Badinan, had not a 
direct influence on the realistic novel of the middle of 
the following century, is a question which criticism has 
scarcely decided ; but that they prepared the minds of 
the readers of those novels is beyond all doubt. 

During the first twenty years after the Restoration, 
poetry was very little cultivated in England outside the 
limits of the heroic drama. That new instrument, the 
couplet, was acknowledged to be an admirable one, and 
to have excluded all competitors. But very little advance 
had been made in the exercise of it during the forty 
years which had followed the publication of Denham's 
Coopers Hill. Dryden, for all his evidence of force, was 
disappointing his admirers. He had shown himself a 
supple prose-writer, indeed ; but his achievements in 
verse up to his fiftieth year were not such as could claim 
for him any pre-eminence among poets. He was at last 
to discover his true field ; he was about to become the 
greatest English satirist, and in doing so to reveal quali- 
ties of magnificent metrical power such as his warmest 
followers had not dreamed of. Since the Elizabethans 
had cultivated a rough and obscure species of satire 
moulded upon Persius, serious work of this class had 
gone out of fashion. But in the reign of Charles I. a 
rattling kind of burlesque rhyming, used for similar pur- 
poses in most of the countries of Europe, came into 
service for parodies, extravagant fables, and satirical 
attacks. In France, Scarron raised it to the level of 
literature, but it was known in England before the days 



1 88 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of Scarron. Cleveland had used it, and Sir John Mennis, 
in whose Musaruin Delicice we find — 

" He, that fights and runs away 
May live to fight ajiother day j " 

and later on it was brought into great popularity by 
Cotton and Samuel Butler. The famous Hudibras of 
the latter, ^Svritten in the time of the Late Wars/' was 
kept in MS. till 1663, when the publication of so gross a 
lampoon on the Presbyterians became possible. It was 
greatly relished, and though it is a barbarous and ribald 
production of small literary value, it is still praised, and 
perhaps occasionally read. It affords rare opportunities 
for quotation, every few pages containing a line or 
couplet of considerable facetiousness. Hudibras was 
incessantly miitated, and the generic term Hudibrastics 
was invented for this kind of daring doggerel. 

Butler, however, is a mere episode. Genuine satire 
was reintroduced by Marvell, and ten years later revived 
by Oldham. The example of that very gifted, if sinister, 
young man, seems to have finally directed Dryden's 
attention to a species of poetry which must already have 
occupied his thoughts in the criticism of Casaubon as 
well as in the marvellous verse of Boileau. Dryden did 
not, however, at first directly imitate the ancients or 
strike an intrepid blow at contemporary bad taste. His 
Absalom a?id Achitopkel (1681-82) is political in character, 
a gallery of satirical portraits of public men, so painted as 
to excite to madness the passions of a faction at a critical 
moment. No poem was ever better timed. Under the 
thin and acceptable disguise of a Biblical narrative, the 
Tory poet gibbeted without mercy the heads and notables 
of the rival party. The two poems which closely fol- 



DRYDEN'S SATIRES 189 

lowed it bore the same stamp. In MacFlecknoe the 
manner is more closely that of Boileau, whom Dryden 
here exceeds in force of bludgeon as far as he lags behind 
him in skill of rapier practice. But these four satires 
hold together, and should always be read in unison. In 
them Dryden suddenly rises to the height of his genius. 
Everything about him has expanded — the daring elo- 
quence, the gusto of triumphant wit, and above all the 
majestic crash of the couplet, have for the first time been 
forged into a war-trumpet, through which the trumpeter 
can peal what notes he wishes. 

For the next tw^n'y years, in spite of his congenital 
irregularity of performance, Dryden continued to be 
incomparably the greatest poet of his age. Although he 
wrote personal sitire no more, he never lost that reso- 
nance, that voluminous note which the anger of 1681 had 
ripened in him. In The Hind and the Panther he softened 
the music a little, and embroidered a harsh garment with 
beautiful ornament of episode. In his successive odes 
and elegies, his copious verse-translations, his songs and 
his fables, he enlarged his ground, and even in his tra- 
gedies and comedies fell no longer below an average of 
merit which would have sufficed to make another man 
famous. This may be a proper moment for a considera- 
tion of Dryden's place in English poetry. It is certain 
that of those who are undeniably the leaders of our song 
he is far from being the most beloved. The fault is not 
all his, nor all that of the flat and uninspiring epoch in 
which he lived. A taste for poetry at the present day 
often involves no intellectual consideration whatever. 
Charm alone is made the criterium of excellence, and we 
often praise nothing but that which startles us by the 
temerity of fancy or the morbidezza of artistic detail. But 



I90 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Dryden, like Horace and Dante, judged otherwise. In 
his own words, ^' They cannot be good poets who are not 
accustomed to argue well." When he congratulated the 
age of which he was the greatest ornament on its poetical 
superiority, he was thinking mainly of intelligence and of 
workmanship. We value these qualities less, perhaps too 
little ; but, at all events, we shall do no justice to Dryden 
if we exclude them from our main conception of his aims. 
What he wished to do, and what he did, was to follow 
the great Latin poets with a close, yet easy reverence, 
and to observe, more obliquely, what the consummate 
Frenchmen of his own time were achieving. To all this 
he added a noble roughness and virility of speech which 
was part of his English birthright, a last legacy from 
the Chaucer and Shakespeare whom he stiil had the 
width of vision to admire. Dryden's exuberant vivacity, 
his solidity of judgment, his extraordinary command of 
all the rhetorical artifices of poetry, pointed him out as a 
leader of men, and should prepare us to find his influence 
the dominant one in all verse-writing in England for a 
hundred years after his death. It was Dryden who gave 
impetus and direction to the oratorical and anti-lyrical 
movement which continued to rule English poetry until, 
in its final decay, it was displaced by the romantic 
naturalism of Wordsworth. 

The foundation and development of modern English 
comedy on the pure Terentian basis is, from a technical 
point of view, one of the most remarkable features of the 
epoch which we are examining. The romantic comedy, 
in which Shakespeare had excelled, and in which even 
Shirley might be considered respectable, had vanished 
entirely with the closing of the theatres. What passed 
for comedy at the Restoration was of the Jonsonian type, 



WYCHERLEY: CONGREVE 191 

the comedy of humours — we have already spoken of 
Wilson's efforts in this direction. But the true modern 
comedy, of which Corneille's Le Menteur (1642) is the 
first finished example, comedy as Moliere understood it, 
was imported into England by Etheredge, in the Man of 
Mode, Sedley, too, less elegantly, was also an innovator ; 
and a few years later William Wycherley, who had 
written a couple of farces or imbroglios in the Spanish 
style, produced in the Country ^F^/^ a vigorous and spark- 
ling imitation of L'Ecole des FemmeSy and followed it up 
with the Plain Dealer^ one of the most brutally cynical, 
but none the less one of the best-constructed pieces 
which have ever held the stage. With his magnificent 
gaiety and buoyancy, Wycherley exaggerated and dis- 
figured the qualities which should rule the comic stage, 
but they were there ; he was a ruffian, but a ruffian of 
genius. Wycherley and Etheredge represented comedy 
under Charles II. At the very close of the century 
there came the young wits whom I have elsewhere 
attempted to distinguish by calHng them the Orange 
School. Of these William Congreve was the greatest; 
his reign was short, from 1693 to 1700, but it was 
extremely brilliant. No one, perhaps, in any country, 
has written prose for the stage with so assiduous 
a solicitude for style. Congreve balances, polishes, 
sharpens his sentences till they seem like a set of 
instruments prepared for an electrical experiment ; the 
current is his unequalled wit, and it flashes and leaps 
without intermission from the first scene to the last. 
The result is one of singular artificiality ; and almost 
from the outset — from the moment, at all events, that 
Congreve's manner ceased to dazzle with its novelty — 
something was felt, even by his contemporaries, to be 



192 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

wanting. The something, no doubt, was humanity, 
sympathy, nature. 

Sir John Vanbrugh has none of Congreve's pre-emi- 
nence in style. He has no style at all : he simply throws 
his characters at one another's heads, and leaves them to 
fight it out as they will. But he has great fire and vigour 
of redundant fancy. After him came Farquhar, with his 
mess-room tone, and what Pope called his ^' pert, low 
dialogue," but also with a manly tenderness that excused 
his faults. Steele followed, with his lachrymose comedies 
of sentiment ; and in Susannah Centlivre the music that 
Etheredge had begun to so sprightly a tune, came to an 
ignominious finale. Of all the brilliant body of litera- 
ture so produced in some forty years, not one piece has 
held the stage. There were moral reasons for this inevi- 
table exclusion. If merit of a purely literary or even 
theatrical kind were alone to be considered, revivals of 
Wycherley and Congreve ought to be frequent. But the 
fact is that Restoration comedy is of a universal profli- 
gate coarseness which enters into the very essence of the 
plot and is irradicable. It is only by dint of the most 
delicate pilotage that one or other of these admirably 
written comedies is now and again, in an extremely 
mTDdified form, safely steered across the footlights. In 
1698 the non-juror Jeremy CoUier made an attack on 
the immorality and profaneness of the English stage. 
The public was on Collier's side, and his blows were so 
efficient that they practically killed, not indecency only, 
but the practice of comedy itself. 

No general survey of the close of the seventeenth cen- 
tury could be complete without a reference to the cele- 
brated dispute as to what was called the Old and the New 
Philosophy. It occupied all the countries of Europe, 



BENTLEY 193 

but chiefly France, where the private sessions of the 
French Academy were torn with disputes about the rela- 
tive importance of the ancient and the modern writers. 
It was raised very definitely by Fontenelle in 1688, and 
by Perrault, each of whom was on the side of the 
moderns. In this country, in 1692, Temple, with volu- 
minous elegance and pomp, printed a solemn defence of 
the Greeks and Latins, and took occasion to praise, in 
terms of the m.ost exaggerated hyperbole, certain Epistles 
of Phalarisy supposed to be written in Attic Greek by a 
Sicilian tyrant of the sixth century before Christ. No- 
body possessed Phalaris, and to meet a sudden demand, 
a publisher issued an edition of his text. Charles Boyle, 
the editor, though a young man of slight erudition, 
doubted the authenticity of the Letters ; but they were 
proved to be spurious in the immortal dissertation by 
Richard Bentley, a publication which- marks an era 
in the development of European scholarship. It is 
the most brilliant piece of destructive commentary that, 
perhaps, was ever published, and it revealed in Bentley 
a critic of an entirely new order. But even more extra- 
ordinary was the textual and verbal work of Bentley, 
whose discovery, as Bunsen has pointed out, is the sci- 
ence of historical philology. Into the controversy which 
raged around the phantom of Phalaris, Swift presently 
descended ; but he added nothing to scholarship, and 
what he gave to literature must be treated in the next 
chapter. Meanwhile it is not uninstructive to find 
Bentley closing these forty years of mainly critical move- 
ment with such an exact criticism of the ancients as no 
one since the days of Scaliger had approached. 

Throughout the period from 1660 to 1700 the word 
*^ criticism " has had incessantly to invade our narrative. 



194 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Looked upon broadly, this was the least creative and the 
most critical of all the main divisions of our literary 
history. The Renaissance had finally departed ; after 
a lingering illness, marked at first by fantastic conceits, 
then by utter insipidity, it had died. It was necessary 
to get hold of something quite living to take its place, 
and w^hat France originally, and then England from 
1660 onwards, chose, was the imitatio veterum, the litera- 
ture, in prose and verse, which seemed most closely to 
copy the models of Latin style. Aristotle and Horace 
were taken not merely as patterns, but as arbiters. No 
feature was permitted unless classical authority for it 
could be produced, and it was needful at every step to 
test an innovation by the rules and the unities. Hence 
the temper of the age became essentially critical, and 
to discuss the machinery of the musical box more im- 
portant than to listen to the music. Instead of the 
licentious use of any stanzaic form that might suit the 
whim of the poet, serious verse was practically tied down 
to the heroic couplet of two rhyming lines of five beats 
each. This had been mainly the creation of Waller 
in England, as the regular pendulous alexandrine was 
of Malherbe in France. Rhyme of this exact and 
balanced kind had been defended, even for plays, by 
Dryden, on the ground that it is that '^ which most 
regulates the fancy, and gives the judgment its busiest 
employment." 

All this is much out of fashion nowadays, and to our 
impressionist critics, eager for sensations — for the '' new 
note," for an ''individual manner" — must seem preposter- 
ous and ridiculous. But a writer like Dryden, responsible 
for the movement of literature in the years immediately 
succeeding the Restoration, had a grave task before 



THE RESTORATION STAGE 195 

him. He was face to face with a bankruptcy ; he had 
to float a new concern on the spot where the old had 
sunken. That uniformity of manner, that lack of salient 
and picturesque individuality, which annoy the hasty 
reader, w^ere really unavoidable. Dryden and Tillotson, 
Locke and Otway, with their solicitude for lucidity of 
language, rigidity of form, and closeness of reasoning, 
were laying anew the foundations upon which literature 
might once more be built. It is better to build on 
Malherbe and Dryden, even if we think the ground- 
plan a little dull, than upon Marino and Gongora. 

Unfortunately, in an age so closely set upon externals 
and the manipulation of language, it was likely that the 
inward part of literature might be neglected. Accord- 
ingly, while the subjects of the latest Stuarts were polish- 
ing their couplets and clarifying their sentences, they 
neglected the natural instincts of the heart. It was an 
age of active intellectual curiosity, but not of pathos 
or of passion. The stage was for ever protesting the 
nobility of its sentiments, yet, save in Venice Preserved^ 
it is difficult to find a single Restoration play where 
there is any tenderness in the elevation, any real tears 
behind the pomp of the rhetoric. The theatre was so 
coarse that its printed relics remain a scandal to Euro- 
pean civilisation, and that the comedies of Otway and 
Southerne (for the tragedians were the greatest sinners 
when they stooped to farce) could ever have been acted 
to mixed audiences, or to any audience at all, can hardly 
be conceived. It would, of course, be very narrow- 
minded to judge the whole age by its plays. It had its 
pure divines, its refined essayists and scholars, its austere 
philosophers. But we cannot go far wrong in taking 
that redoubtable gossip Pepys as a type of the whole. 



196- MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

It was not an enthusiastic, nor a delicate, nor an impas- 
sioned age, and we must not look for intensity in its 
productions. What we should admire and should be 
grateful for are its good sense, its solidity of judgment, 
and its close attention to thoroughness and simplicity 
in workmanship. 



VI 

THE AGE OF ANNE 

I 700-1 740 

During the final years of the reign of WilHam III. htera- 
ture in England was in a stagnant condition. Almost 
the only department in which any vitality was visible 
was comic drama, represented by Congreve, Gibber, 
Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. A vast quantity of verse was 
poured forth, mainly elegiac and occasional, but most of 
it of an appalling badness. At the death of Dryden, in 
1700, only two noticeable non-dramatic poets survived. 
Garth, who had just published a pohshed burlesque, ths 
Dispensary y under the influence of Boileau's Le Lutriny 
and Addison, whose hyperbolic compliments addressed 
to ^^ godlike Nassau" were written in verse which took 
up the prosody of Waller as if Dryden had never existed. 
In criticism the wholesome precepts of Dryden seemed 
to have been utterly forgotten, and Rymer, a pedagogue 
upon Parnassus, was pushing the rules of the French 
Jesuits to an extreme which excluded Shakespeare, Flet- 
cher, and Spenser from all consideration, and threatened 
the prestige of Dryden himself. In prose Bishop Burnet 
was writing, but he properly belongs to an earlier and 
again to a later age. Samuel Clarke was preaching, 
Steele was beginning to feel his way, Shaftesbury was 

privately printing one short tract. On the whole, it was 

197 



198 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the lowest point reached by Enghsh Hterature during the 
last three hundred years. The cause of such sterility and 
languor can scarcely be determined. The forces which 
had been introduced in the first decade after the Restora- 
tion were exhausted, and it was necessary to rest a little 
while before taking another start. 

But in 1702 Queen Anne ascended the throne, and her 
brief reign is identified with a brilliant revival in English 
letters, in the hands of a group of men of the highest 
accomplishment and originality. It must be noted, how- 
ever, that this revival did not take place until the Queen 
was near her end, and that of the writers of the age of Anne 
but few had published anything considerable until within 
three years of her death. It would be historically more 
exact to distinguish this period in literature as the age 
of George I., the years from 1714 to 1727 being those 
in which some of the most characteristic works of the 
school were published ; but the other name has become 
hallowed by long practice, and George I. certainly deserves 
as little as any monarch who ever reigned the credit of 
being a judicious patron of letters. It is interesting, 
indeed, to note that by 1714 almost all the characteristic 
forces of the age were started. Pope had reached his 
Homer ; Swift was pouring forth tracts ; Shaftesbury, 
Arbuthnot, Mandeville, and even Berkeley had pub- 
lished some of their most typical writings ; while the 
Tatler and \hQ Spectator had actually run their course. 
All this activity, however, dates from the very close of 
Queen Anne's life. Between 171 1 and 1714 a perfect 
galaxy of important works in prose and verse burst 
almost simultaneously from the London presses. It was 
as though a cloud which had long obscured the heavens 
had been swept away by a wind, which, in so doing, had 



THE JESUIT CRITICS 199 

revealed a splendid constellation. In 1702 no country 
in civilised Europe was in a more melancholy condi- 
tion of intellectual emptiness than England ; in 1712 not 
France itself could compare with us for copious and 
vivid production. 

Meanwhile, almost unperceived, the critic had begun 
to make his appearance, for the first time, in the form 
with which we have since been familiar. The French 
asserted that it was Castelvetro and Piccolomini, Italian 
VvTiters of the end of the sixteenth century, who first 
taught that just comprehension of the Poetics of Aristotle 
in which modern criticism began. These scholars, how- 
ever, were unknown in England, where it was the French 
critics, and, in particular, Rapin and Le Bossu, who intro- 
duced to us the Aristotelian criticism of imaginative litera- 
ture. Rene Rapin, in particular, exercised an immense 
authority in this country, and w^as the practical law-giver 
from the last quarter of the seventeenth century onward. 
Rymer and Dennis founded their dogmas entirely on his 
Reflections, merely modifying to English convenience his 
code of rules. Rapin has been strangely forgotten ; 
when he died in 1687, he was the leading critic of Europe, 
and he is the writer to whom more than to any other is 
due the line taken by English poetry for the next hun- 
dred years. The peculiarity of his Reflections, which were 
promptly translated into English, was, that they aimed 
at adapting the laws and theories of Aristotle to modern 
practice. As is often the case, Rapin was less rigid th:ui 
his disciples ; he frequently develops a surprisingly just 
conception of what the qualities of the highest literature 
should be. 

The school of Rapin, who moulded the taste and 
practice of the young men who were to be the pioneers 



200 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of the age of Anne, claimed for Aristotle the unbounded 
allegiance of all who entered the domain of verse. 
Every man of judgment was blindly to resign his own 
opinions to the dictates of Aristotle, and to do this 
because the reasons given for these rules are as con- 
vincing and as lucid as any demonstration in mathe- 
matics. But Aristotle had approached literature only as 
a philosopher ; for Rapin they claimed the merit of 
having been the first to apply the Aristotelian principles 
to modern practice. The English disciples of Rapin 
accepted his formulas, and used them to give literature 
a new start, and thus Rapin came to be the father of 
eighteenth-century criticism. The first review of a book 
in the modern sense may be said to have been John 
Dennis's tract on a fashionable epic of the moment, 
published in 1696 ; here was a plea for sober judgment, 
something that should be neither gross praise nor wild 
abuse. The subject of this tract was negligible, but 
Dennis presently came forward with dissertations on 
more serious forms of literature. Dennis has been reso- 
lutely misjudged, in consequence of his foolish attitude 
towards his younger contemporaries in old age, but in 
his prime he was a writer of excellent judgment. He was 
the first English critic to do unstinted justice to Milton 
and to Moliere, and he was a powerful factor in preparing 
public opinion for the literary verdicts of Addison. 

It is not to be supposed that critics of the prestige of 
Dennis or Rymer would address the public from a less 
dignified stage than that of a book, or, at worst, a sixpenny 
pamphlet. But at the close of the reign of William III. 
we meet with the earliest apparition of literary criticism 
in periodical publications. In other w^ords, the news- 
paper was now beginning to take literary form, and the 



EARLY JOURNALISM . 201 

introduction of such a factor must not be left unmentioned 
here. The first reviews printed in an EngHsh newspaper 
were those appended by Dunton to the Athenian Gazette 
in 1 691 ; but these were not original, they were simply 
translated out of the Journal des Savans, Notices of 
books, in the modern sense, began to be introduced 
very timidly into some of the news-sheets about the 
year 1701. Nor was this the only direction in which 
literary journaHsm was started ; men of real importance 
began to take part in newspaper-writing, and the English 
press may name among the earliest of its distinguished 
servants such personages as Atterbury, Kennet, Hoadley, 
and Defoe. 

While, therefore, we cannot claim for the opening 
years of the century the production of any master- 
pieces, and while its appearance, from an intellectual 
point of view, is to us quiescent, yet without doubt 
the seeds of genius were swelling in the darkness. 
In all departments of thought and art, Englishmen were 
throwing off the last rags of the worn-out garments of 
the Renaissance, and were accustoming themselves to 
wear with comfort their new suit of classical formulas. 
In poetry, philosophy, history, religion, the age was 
learning the great lesson that the imagination was no 
longer to be a law unto itself, but was to follow closely 
a code dictated by reason and the tradition of the an- 
cients. Enthusiasm was condemned as an irregularity, 
the daring use of imagery as an error against manners. 
The divines were careful to restrain their raptures, and 
to talk and write like lawyers. Philosophical writers 
gladly modelled themselves on Hobbes and Locke, the 
nakedness of whose unenthusiastic style was eminently 
sympathetic to them, although they conceived a greater 
14 



202 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

elegance of delivery necessary. Their speculations be- 
came mainly ethical^ and the elements of mystery and 
romance almost entirely died out. Neither the pursuit 
of pleasure nor the assuaging of conscience, no active 
force of any kind, became supreme with the larger class 
of readers ; but the new bourgeois rank of educated 
persons, which the age of Queen Anne created, occu- 
pied itself in a passive analysis of human nature. It 
loved to sit still and watch the world go by ; an appetite 
for realistic description, bounded by a decent code, and 
slipping neither up into enthusiasm nor down into scep- 
ticism, became the ruling passion of the age. During 
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, common-sense 
had been by no means characteristic of the English race, 
which had struggled, flaunted, or aspired. It now went 
back to something like its earlier serenity, and in an age 
of comparatively feeble emotion and slight intensity took 
things as they were. In Shaftesbury, a writer of provi- 
sional but extraordinary influence, we see this common- 
sense taking the form of a mild and exuberant optimism ; 
and perhaps what makes the dark figure of Swift stand 
out so vividly against the rose-grey background of the 
age is the incongruity of his violence and misanthropy in 
a world so easy-going. 

In chronological sequence, it should, perhaps, be the 
theology of the early part of the reign of Anne which 
should first attract us, but it need not detain us long. 
The golden age of Anghcan theology had long passed 
away, and in the progress of latitudinarianism, culminat- 
ing, through Locke, in the pronounced deists, literature 
as an art has little interest. A tolerant rationahsm was 
not likely to encourage brilliant writing, the orthodox 
churchmen wrote like wrangling lawyers, and the non- 



CLARKE 203 

jurors and dissenters, who produced some vigorous 
scholars later on, were now as dreary as their opponents. 
Of the early deists, Shaftesbury alone was a man of 
style, and him we shall presently meet with in another 
capacity. Among the theologians, the most eminent 
writer was Samuel Clarke, ^^the greatest Enghsh re- 
presentative of the a priori method of constructing a 
system of theology." His once famous collection of 
Boyle Lectures (1704-5) long seemed a classic to admiring 
readers, and still affects our conventional notions of 
theology. Clarke, however, has few readers to-day, and 
his manner of statement, which resembles that of a 
mathematician propounding a theorem, is as tedious 
to us now as it was fascinating to the group of young 
controversialists who clustered round Clarke during his 
brief career at Cambridge. In the hands of Clarke and 
his school, theological writing followed the lines laid 
down for it by Tillotson, but with a greatly accentuated 
aridity and neatness. In the search for symmetry these 
authors neglected almost every other excellence and orna- 
ment of literary expression. 

If philosophy at the opening of the eighteenth century 
could give a better account of itself, it was mainly because 
the leading philosopher was a born writer. The third 
Earl of Shaftesbury has been strangely neglected by 
the historians of our literature, partly because his scheme 
of thought has long been rejected, and partly because his 
style, in which some of the prolixity of the seventeenth 
century still Hngered, was presently obliterated by the 
technical smartness of Addison and Swift. With the 
meaning of Shaftesbury's doctrine of virtue, and with the 
value of his optimism and plea for harmony, w^e have 
nothing here to do, but his influence on writing in his 



204 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

own age and down the entire eighteenth century is highly- 
important to us. Commonly as the fact is overlooked, 
Shaftesbury was one of the literary forces of the time — ■ 
he was, perhaps, the greatest between Dryden and Swift. 
He died in 1713, two years after his miscellaneous treatises, 
written at intervals during the fifteen years preceding, had 
been published in those handsome volumes of the Charac- 
teristics. Shaftesbury's long residences in Holland gave 
him the opportunity of becoming thoroughly acquainted 
with the movement of Continental thought to an extent 
doubtless beyond any previous writer of English prose. 
The effect is seen on his style and temper, which are less 
insular than those of any of the men with whom it is 
natural to compare him. It is to be noted also that 
Shaftesbury was the earliest English author whose works 
in the vernacular were promptly admired abroad, and 
he deserves remembrance as the first who really broke 
down the barrier which excluded England from taking 
her proper place in the civilisation of literary Europe. 

The writers who were to shine in prose immediately 
after the death of Shaftesbury w^ere distinguished for 
the limpid fluency and grace of their manner. In this 
Shaftesbury did not resemble them, but rather set an 
example for the kind of prose which was to mark the 
central years of the century. There is nothing about 
him which reminds us of the nobleman that writes with 
ease : he is elaborate and self-conscious to the highest de- 
gree, embroidered with ornament of dainty phraseology, 
anxious to secure harmony and yet to surprise the fancy. 
The style of Shaftesbury glitters and rings, proceeding 
along in a capricious, almost mincing effort to secure 
elegance, with a sort of colourless euphuism, which isi 
desultory and a little irritating indeed, yet so curious that] 



SHAFTESBURY 205 

one marvels that it should have fallen completely into 
neglect. He is the father of aestheticism, the first Eng- 
lishman who developed theories of formal virtue, who 
attempted to harmonise the beautiful with the true and 
the good. His delicate, Palladian style, in which a certain 
external stiffness and frigidity seem to be holding down 
a spirit eager to express the passion of beauty, is a very 
interesting feature of the period to which we have now 
arrived. The modern attitude of mind seems to meet us 
first in the graceful, cosmopolitan writings of Shaftesbury, 
and his genius, like a faint perfume, pervades the contem- 
plation of the arts down to our own day. Without a 
Shaftesbury there would hardly have been a Ruskin or a 
Pater. 

Be this as it may, it is quite certain that the brilliant 
school of poets who began to make their appearance just 
as Shaftesbury was dying, owed to him the optimism of 
their religious and philosophical system. But it was 
mainly to the French that they were indebted for the 
impetus which started them; and if France had already 
made a deep mark on our literature between 1660 and 
1674, it made another, not less indelible, in 1710. What 
the influence of Rapin, thirty-five years before, had done 
to regulate taste in England, and to enforce the rules laid 
down by the ancients, had not proved stimulating to 
poetic genius, and, with the death of Dryden, we have 
seen that poetry practically ceased to exist in England. 
When it returned it was mainly in consequence of the 
study of another Frenchman, but this time of a poet, 
Boileau, whose influence on the mind of Pope, care- 
fully concealed by the latter, was really far greater than 
any critic has ventured to confess. There were certain 
qualities in Boileau which can but have appealed directly 



2o6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

to the young Pope^ who in 1710 was twenty-two years 
of age. Boileau had not been so closely wedded to 
pedantic rules as his friends the Jesuit critics w^ere. He 
had insisted on inspiration, on the value of ceaseless 
variety, on obedience to the laws of language. The pre- 
face to the 1701 edition of his works is one of the land- 
marks of European criticism, and we can scarcely doubt 
that it awakened a high spirit of emulation in the youth- 
ful Pope. In it Boileau had urged that none should ever 
be presented to the public in verse but true thoughts and 
just expressions. He had declaimed against frigidity of 
conceit and tawdry extravagance, and had proclaimed 
the virtues of simplicity without carelessness, sublimity 
without presumption, a pleasing air without fard. He 
had boldly convicted his predecessors of bad taste, and 
had called his lax contemporaries to account. He had 
blamed the sterile abundance of an earlier period, and 
the uniformity of dull writers. Such principles were 
more than all others likely to commend themselves to 
Pope, and his practice shows us that they did. 

We cannot think of the poetry of the age of Anne and 
not of Alexander Pope. As little ought we to analyse 
Pope and fail to admit what he owes to Boileau. The 
"Law-giver of Parnassus" gave laws, it is certain, to the 
hermit of Windsor Forest. The work of no other great 
English writer has coincided \\4th that of a foreigner so 
closely as Pope's does w^ith that of Boileau. The French 
satirist had recommended polish, and no one practised 
it more thoroughly than Pope did. Boileau discouraged 
love- poetry, and Pope did not seriously attempt it. 
Boileau paraphrased Horace, and in so doing formulated 
his own poetical code, in V Art Poetique ; Pope did 
the same in the Essay on Criticism. Boileau specially 



POPE 207 

urged the imitation of Homer on young poets, and 
Pope presently devoted himself to the Iliad. In Le 
Luti'iii Boileau had written the best mock-heroic, till 
Pope, in closely analogous form, surpassed him in the 
Rape of the Lock. The Satires of Pope would not have 
been written but for those of his French predecessor ; 
and even Pope's Elegy and Eloisa can be accounted for 
in the precepts of Boileau. The parallel goes very far 
indeed : it is the French poet first, and not the English 
one, who insists that the shepherds of pastoral must not 
speak as they do in a country village. Pope's very 
epitaphs recall Boileau's labours with the inscriptions of 
the Petite Academic. That purity and decency of phrase 
which the school of Pope so beneficially introduced into 
the coarse field of English literature had been strenu- 
ously urged on Frenchmen by Boileau. It cannot be too 
strongly emphasised that it is not so much to Dryden, 
whose influence on Pope has certainly been exaggerated, 
but to the author of Le Lutrin, that the poetry of the age 
of Anne owed its general impulse, and its greatest poet 
the general tendency of almost every branch of his pro- 
duction. It is true that Pope told Spence that ^' I learned 
versification wholly from Dryden's works," his prosody 
being a continuation and development of that of Dryden ; 
but in the use to which he put his verse, it was certainly 
the great Frenchman (who died two months before Pope's 
earliest important poem Vv'as published) that was his 
master. Walsh had told him, in 1706, that '^ the best of 
the modern poets in all languages are those that have 
the nearest copied the ancients " ; but we may not doubt 
that it was through Boileau that Pope arrived at a com- 
prehension of Horace, and so of Aristotle. 

For more than thirty years Pope was so completely the 



2o8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

centre of poetical attention in England that he may 
almost be said to have comprised the poetry of his time. 
There is no second instance of an Enghsh poet pre- 
serving for so long a period a supremacy comparable to 
his. It is possible to defend the position that one or two 
other versemen of the age did some particular thing 
better than Pope, though even this requires argument ; 
but it is quite certain that he alone excelled over a wide 
range of subjects. The fact of Pope's poetical ubiquity, 
however, is rendered much less miraculous by the con- 
sideration that if he triumphed over the entire field, the 
area of that field was extremely restricted. There was 
never a period, from the Middle Ages till to-day, when 
the practice of verse was limited to so few forms as it 
was under the reign of Pope. Lyrical writing, save in 
the mildest and most artificial species, was not cultivated; 
there was no poetical drama, tragic or comic ; there was 
no description of nature, save the merest convention ; 
there was scarcely any love-poetry ; no devotional verse 
of any importance ; no epic or elegy or ode that de- 
served the name. Poetry existed, practically, in but 
three forms — the critical or satirical, the narrative or 
didactic, and the occasional — these three, indeed, being 
so closely correlated that it is not always very easy to 
distinguish them. 

It was Pope's aim to redeem verse from unholy uses, 
to present to the reader none but true thoughts and 
noble expressions, and to dedicate the gravest form to 
the highest purpose. His actual practice was not at first 
so exalted. The boyish Pastorals scarcely call for notice ; 
but in the Essay on Criticism he achieved at twenty-one 
a work of rare grace and authority. He began where 
other poets have left off, and it is not a little characteristic 



PRIOR: POPE 209 

of Pope's temperament that he should not open with 
strong, irregular verse, and push on to the comparative 
stagnation of the critical attitude, but should make this 
latter the basis of his life-work. The Essay is in most 
respects inferior to its French prototype, more hastily 
and irregularly composed, and with far less ripeness of 
judgment ; but it is graceful and eloquent, and for the 
eighteenth century it provided an almost unchallenged 
code of taste. Matthew Prior in the same year, though 
more than twice the age of Pope, ventured upon the 
earliest publication of his poems, bringing from the close 
of the seventeenth century a certain richness of style 
which we find not in the younger man. His ballads and 
songs, with their ineffable gaiety, his satires and epigrams, 
so Hghtly turned, enriched the meagre body of English 
verse with a gift, much of which should really be attri- 
buted to the age of Dryden. But Prior was not less 
closely related to the generation of Pope in his Horatian 
attitude and his brilliant Gallic grace. He was, however, 
but an occasional trifler with his charming muse, and 
had none of the younger master's undeviating ambition. 
From 171 1, to follow the career of Pope is to take part 
in a triumph in which the best of his contemporaries 
secures but a secondary part. The Rape of the Lock 
(17 1 2-14) lifted Pope at once to the first rank of living 
Eur6pean poets. In lightness of handling, in elegance 
of badinage, in exquisite amenity of style — that is to say, 
in the very qualities which Latin Europe had hitherto, 
and not without justice, denied us — the little British bar- 
barian surpassed all foreign competitors. This is the 
turning-point of English subserviency to French taste. 
Pope and his school had closely studied their Boileau, 
and had learned their lesson well, so well that for the 



210 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

future England is no longer the ape of the French, but 
is competent, more and more confidently as the century 
descends, to give examples to the polite world. 

A few years later all the countries of Europe were taking 
these examples, and the imitation of Pope grew to be the 
rage from Sweden to Italy. Meanwhile, the youth of four-' 
and-twenty was gaining mastery in his art. The Messiah 
(of 1712) reached a pitch of polished, resonant rhetoric 
hitherto undreamed of, and was a ^^ copy of verses" which 
became the model and the despair of five generations of 
poets. Each of these productions stamped more defi- 
nitely the type of '^ classical" versification, tone, and 
character, and all Pope had now to do was to enlarge 
his knowledge of human nature, and to cultivate that 
extreme delicacy of phrase and rapidity of intellectual 
movement which were his central peculiarities. 

He had early learned to master the art of poetry ; but 
although he was already famous, none of those works in 
which he was to concentrate and illustrate the whole 
thought and fashion of his age were yet written. Pope 
w^as far more than the most skilful of versifiers : he was 
the microcosm of the reign of George I. There is scarcely 
a belief, a tradition, an ideal of that age which is not to 
be discovered lucidly set down in the poems of Pope, 
who was not vastly above his epoch, as some great 
poetical prophets have been, but exactly on a level 
with it, and from our distance its perfect mirror. But 
before he took up this work of his advanced years he 
gave the remainder of his youth to a task of high and 
fertile discipline. From 17 13, when Swift was going 
about begging subscriptions for ^^the best poet in Eng- 
land, Mr. Pope, a Papist," till 1725, when the Odyssey 
appeared, he was mainly occupied in translating from 



POPE 2 11 

the Greek, or in revising the translations of others. His 
individuahty was so strong, or his realisation of Hellenic 
art so imperfect, that he conceived a Homer of his own, 
a Homer polished and restrained to polite uses, no 
longer an epic poet, but a conteur of the finest modern 
order, fluent, manly, and distinguished, yet essentially 
a writer of Pope's own day and generation. The old 
complaints of Pope's Homer are singularly futile. It was 
not an archaistic or a romantic version that England and 
her subscribers wanted ; they desired a fine, scholarly 
piece in the taste of their own times, and that was exactly 
what Pope was competent to give them. 

But if they were the gainers by his twelve years' 
labour, so was he. The close study of the Homeric 
diction gave firmness and ease to his style, concentrated 
his powers, determined his selection of poetic material. 
What Pope wrote during the Homeric period was not 
considerable in extent, but it included his only incursions 
into the province of love, the beautiful Elegy to tJie 
Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and the Eloisa to Abelard 
{1717). These years, however, marked the solidification 
of the school of which he was the acknowledged leader, 
even though some of its members seemed his enemies. 
Addison, his great rival, had published in 1713 his 
tragedy of Cato, in which the rules of Horace were applied 
with stringent exactitude, the result being of an exquisite 
frigidity. In the same year Gay came forward, a skilful 
and fairly independent satellite of Pope ; between 1713 
and 1726 contributing a copious and sprightly flow of 
short pastorals, songs, and epistles. The elegant Arch- 
deacon of Clogher,- too, Thomas Parnell, wrote with 
gravity and wit under the direct stimulus of Pope's 
friendship. He died in 1718, and the posthumous collec- 



2 12 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

tion which his master issued four years later contained 
some harmonious odes and narratives which have not 
quite disappeared from living English literature. Tickell, 
who loved Addison and hated Pope, was writing, between 
1 7 19 and 1722, poems which owed more to Pope than to 
Addison, and in particular an elegy on the great essayist 
which is one of the most dignified funeral pieces in the 
language. Prior, who died in 1721, had finally collected 
his writings in 17 18, and Swift ever and anon put forth 
an erratic fragment of vivid caustic verse. All this record 
of poetical activity dates from those years during which 
Pope was buried in Homer, but through it all his own 
claim to the highest place was scarcely questioned, 
although he was the youngest of the group. 

Pope emerged from Homer in 1725, ready to take his 
place again in militant literature. But the world was not 
the same to him. Of his elders and compeers half passed 
away while he was finishing the Iliad — Garth, Parnell, 
Addison, Lady Winchelsea, and Prior. Congreve and 
Gay grew languid and fatigued. The great quarrels of 
Pope's life began, and the acrid edge was set on his 
temper. But Atterbury had long ago assured him that 
satire was his true forte, and Swift encouraged him to 
turn from melancholy reflection on the great friends he 
had lost, to l:itter jesting with the little enemies that 
remained to him. In 1728-29 the Dunciad lashed the 
bad writers of the age in couplets that rang with the 
crack of a whip. During the remainder of his life, Pope 
was actively engaged in the composition and rapid pub- 
lication of ethical and satirical poems, most of which 
appeared in successive folio pamphlets between 173 1 and 
1738. It has been conjectured that all these pieces were 
fragments of a great philosophical poem which he in- 



POPE 213 

tended one day to complete, with the addition of that 
New Dunciad (1742) which was the latest of Pope's im- 
portant writings. Among these scattered pieces the most 
famous are the four parts of the Essay on MaUy the 
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, and the successive Imitations 
of Horace. 

In these poems of the maturity of Pope there is no 
longer any distinct trace of French influence. They 
mark the full coming of age of the English classical 
school. The lesson first taught by the Royalists who 
came back from the Continent in 1660 was now com- 
pletely learned ; criticism had finished its destructive 
work long before, and on the basis so swept clear of all 
the ruins of the Renaissance a new kind of edifice was 
erected. In the Fables of Dryden, in the tragedies of 
Otway and Congreve (the Mourning Bride^y something 
was left of the sonorous irregularity of the earlier seven- 
teenth century, a murmur, at least, of the retreating 
wave. But in such a satire as of the Use of Riches 
not the faintest echo of the old romantic style remains. 
It is not fair, in such a conjunction, to take passages in 
which the colloquial wit of Pope is prominent ; but 
here are verses which are entirely serious, and intended 
to be thoroughly poetical : 

" Consult the genius of the place in all ; 
That tells the waters 0?' to rise or fall, 
Or helps the ambitious hill the heavens to scale, 
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale; 
Calls in the country, catches opening glades, 
foins willing woods, and varies shades fron shades; 
Now breaks, or ?tow directs, the inte7iding liius ; 
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs y 

Is this poetry or not ? That is the question which 
has troubled the critics for a hundred years, and seems 



214 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

as little to be capable of solution as the crux of pre- 
destination and free-will. That it is not poetry of the 
same class as a chorus out of Prometheus Unbound or 
a tirade out of the Duchess of Malfy is obvious ; but 
this is no answer to the query. Certain facts need to 
be observed. One is, that to several successive genera- 
tions of highly intelligent men this did appear to be 
poetry, and of a very high order. Another is, that since 
the revolution compassed by Wordsworth we have been 
living under a prejudice in favour of the romantic 
manner which may or may not be destined to last much 
longer. If another revolution in taste should overwhelm 
us, Adonais and Tintern Abbey may easily grow to seem 
grotesquely unreadable. It is wise, therefore, not to 
moot a question which cannot be solved, as Matthew- 
Arnold tried to solve it, by calling '^ Dryden and Pope 
not classics of our poetry, but classics of our prose." 
Pope was not a classic of prose ; he wrote almost ex- 
clusively in a highly finished artistic verse, which may 
evade the romantic formulas, but is either poetry or 
nothing. The best plan is to admit that it is poetry, and 
to define it. 

In their conception of that class of poetry, then, of 
which the later works of Pope supply the most brilliant 
example, the English classicists returned to what the 
French had taught them to believe to be a Latin 
manner. They found in the admirable poets of anti- 
quity, and particularly in Horace, a determination to 
deal with the average and universal interests and obser- 
vations of mankind, rather than with the exceptional, 
the startling, and the violent. They desired to express 
these common thoughts and emotions with exquisite 
exactitude, to make of their form and substance alike 



POPE 215 

an amalgam of intense solidity, capable of a high polish. 
If we had asked Pope what quality he conceived that 
he had achieved in the Essay on Man, he would have 
answered, " Horatii curiosa felicitas," the consummate 
skill in fixing normal ideas in such a way as to 
turn common clay into perdurable bronze. By the 
side of such a design as this it would have seemed to 
him a poor thing to dig out rough ore of passion, like 
Donne, or to spin gossamer-threads of rainbow-coloured 
fancy, like Shelley. We may not agree with him, be- 
cause we. still live in a romantic age. It is hardly likely, 
moreover, that, whatever change comes over English 
taste, we shall ever return exactly to the Boileauesque- 
Horatian polishing of commonplaces in couplets. But 
to admire Ibsen and Tolstoi, and to accept them as 
imaginative creators, is to come back a long way towards 
the position held by Pope and Swift, towards the sup- 
position that the poet is not a child dazzled by lovely 
illusions and the mirage of the world, but a grown-up 
person to whom the limits of experience are patent, who 
desires above all things to see mankind steadily and 
perspicuously. In its palmy days at least, that is to say 
during the lifetime of Pope, ^^ classical" English poetry 
was, within its narrow range, an art exquisitely per- 
formed by at least one artist of the very first class. 
That this height was not long sustained, and that decline 
was rapid, will be our observation in a later chapter. 

More durable has been the impress on our prose of the 
great critical contemporaries of Pope. One of the land- 
marks in the history of literature is the date, April 12, 
1709, when Mr. Isaac Bickerstaff began to circulate his 
immortal lucubrations in the first gratis number of the 
Tatler, Here, at last, the easy prose of everyday life 



2i6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

had found a medium in which^ without a touch of 
pedantry, it could pass Hghtly and freely across the 
minds of men. The place which those newspapers 
hold in our memory is quite out of proportion with the 
duration of their issue. We hardly reahse that the Tatler 
lasted only until January 171 1, and that the Spectator 
itself, though started two months later, expired before 
the close of 171 2. Three years and eight months suf- 
ficed to create the English essay, and lift it to an 
impregnable position as one of the principal forms of 
which literature should henceforth consist. In this 
great enterprise, the importance of which in the his- 
tory of literature can hardly be exaggerated, popular 
opinion long gave the main, almost the exclusive 
credit to Joseph Addison. But the invention of the 
periodical essay we now know to have been Richard 
Steele's, and of the 271 Tatlers only 42 are certainly 
Addison's. 

In the Spectator their respective shares were more 
exactly balanced, and the polished pen of Addison took 
precedence. We gather that, of these immortal friends, 
Steele was the more fertile in invention, Addison the 
more brilliant and captivating in execution. It was 
cruel in Swift, and only partly true, to say that politics 
had turned Steele from ''an excellent droll" into ''a 
very awkward pamphleteer " ; yet Steele could be 
awkward. ''The elegance, purity, and correctness" 
which delighted all readers of the essays were contri- 
buted by Addison, and were appreciated in his own age 
to a degree which appears to us slightly exaggerated, 
for we have learned to love no less the humour and 
pathos of Steele. Without the generous impulse of 
Steele the unfailing urbanity of Addison might have 



THE TATLER 217 

struck a note of frigidity. Contemporaries, who eagerly 
welcomed their daily sheet, in which Mr. Spectator re- 
tailed the reflections and actions of his club, did not 
pause to think how much of its unique charm depended 
on the fortunate interaction of two minds, each lucid, 
pure, and brilliant, yet each, in many essential quali- 
ties, widely distinguished from the other. ^^ To enliven 
morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality," 
was indeed a charming design when practised by two 
moralists, each of whom was witty in a different 
direction from the other. 

The presentation of the first number of the Taller to 
the town marked nothing less than the creation of 
modern journalism. Here, as in so much else, France 
had been ahead of us, for since 1672 the Mercure and its 
successors had satisfied the curiosity of Parisians as to 
things in general. Quicquid agunt homineSy said the 
motto, and it was Steele who made the discovery for 
Englishmen that the daily diversion of the newspaper was 
one which might be made so fascinating and so neces- 
sary that the race might presently be unable to dispense 
with it. The earliest English newspaper is usually said 
to be that leaf issued in 1622, under the pseudonym of 
Mercurius Britannicus, by Nathaniel Butter ; but the 
sheets of this kind, generically known as MermrieSy had 
little of the aspect of a modern journal. The Public In- 
telligencer (1663), of Roger U Estrange, had more of the 
true newspaper character, and began the epoch of the 
gazettes, ^^ pamphlets of news," as they were called. The 
Daily Courant (1702) was the earliest daily journal. In 
all these precursors of the Tatler there had been scarcely 
a touch of literature. In his opening number Steele 
offered an unprecedented olio, combining social gossip, 
15 



2i8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

poetry, learning, the news of the day, and miscellaneous 
entertainment ; and he appealed at once to a whole 
world of new^ readers. 

The result w^as something of so startling and delight- 
ful a novelty that the town was revolutionised. At first 
the anonymity was well preserved; but in the fifth Tatler 
Addison recognised a remark he had made to Steele, and 
in the eighteenth he was dragged into the concern. As 
the periodical continued, and the taste of the public be- 
came gauged, the portion given to news was reduced, 
and the essay took a more and more prominent place. 
It is generally conjectured that this was due to Addison's 
influence, whose part in the whole transaction was the 
academic one of pruning and training the rough shoots 
that sprang from Steele's vigorous wilding. If Steele 
continued, however, to be predominant on the Tatler^ 
Addison so completely imprinted his own image upon 
the later journal that to this day Mr. Spectator is an equi- 
valent of Addison's name. The famous circle of typical . 
figures, the Club, was broadly sketched by Steele, but it 
was Addison who worked the figures up to that minute 
perfection which we now admire in Will Honeycomb 
and Sir Roger de Coverley. So complete was the co- 
operation, however, that it would be rash to decide too 
sharply what in the conception of the immortal essays 
belongs to one friend and what to the other. 

In examining the light literature of a hundred years 
earlier, we were confronted by the imitation of Theo- 
phrastus, and now, in the Spectator ^ we meet with it again. 
The best of the modern Theophrastians was La Bruyere, 
and it w^ere idle to deny that the characters of Addison 
were originally modelled on French lines. It would be 
a serious error indeed to think of Addison as a mere 



THE SPECTATOR 219 

imitator of the Caracteres, as Marivaux was later of 
the Spectator^ but EngHsh criticism has hardly been 
content to admit the closeness of the earlier resem- 
blance. Addison and Steele did not consider it their 
duty to satirise particular persons, and they possessed a 
gift in the dramatic creation, as distinguished from the 
observation, of types such as La Bruyere did not possess, 
or, at all events, did not exercise ; but the invention of 
combining a moral essay with a portrait in a general, 
desultory piece of occasional literature was not theirs, 
but La Bruyere's. His field, however, was limited to the 
streets of cities, and he did nothing to expand the general 
interests of his contemporaries ; he w^as a delightful 
satirist and most malicious urban gossip. But Addison 
and Steele had their eye on England as w^ell as on 
London ; their aim, though a genial, was an ethical and 
elevated one ; they developed, studied, gently ridiculed 
the country gentleman. In their shrewdly civil way they 
started a new kind of national sentiment, polite, easy, 
modern, in which woman took her civilising place ; 
they ruled the fashions in letters, in manners, even in 
costume. They were the first to exercise the generous 
emancipating influence of the free press, and an epoch 
in the history of journalism w^as marked when, the pre- 
face to Dr. Fleetwood's Sermons being suppressed by 
order of the House of Commons, fourteen thousand 
copies of it were next morning circulated in the columns 
of the Spectator. 

In several ways, however, these marvellous journals 
were proved to be ahead of their age. When the Spec- 
tator ceased, at the close of 171 2, there w^as a long obscu- 
ration of the light of the literary newspaper. Political 
heat disturbed the Guardian^ and later ventures enjoyed 



220 IVfODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

even smaller success. To the regret of all true lovers of 
literature, Addison and Steele were presently at daggers 
drawn in opposed and quite inglorious news-sheets. But 
the experiment had been made, and the two famous 
journals may live all the more brilliantly in our memory 
because their actual existence was not too lengthy to 
permit them to come to life again in the more durable 
form of books. 

We have hitherto said nothing of Jonathan Swift, 
yet he flows right across the present field of our vision, 
from William III. to George II. His course is that of a 
fiery comet that dashes through the constellation of the 
wits of Anne, and falls in melancholy ashes long after the 
occultation of the last of them. The friend 'and com- 
panion of them for a season, he pursues his flaming 
course with little real relation to their milder orbits, and 
is one of the most singular and most original figures that 
our history has produced. Swift was a bundle of para- 
doxes — a great churchman who has left not a trace on 
our ecclesiastical system, an ardent politician who was 
never more than a fly on the wheel. He is immortal on 
the one side on which he believed his genius ephemeral ; 
he survives solely, but splendidly, as a man of letters. 
His career was a failure : he began life as a gentleman's 
dependent, he quitted it 'Mike a poisoned rat in a hole '* ; 
with matchless energy and ambition, he won neither place 
nor power ; and in the brief heyday of his influence 
v;ith the Ministry, he who helped others was impotent 
to endow himself. Swift is the typical instance of the 
powerlessness of pure intellect to secure any but intellec- 
tual triumphs. But even the victories of his brain were 
tainted ; his genius left a taste of brass on his own palate. 
That Swift w::s ever happy, that his self-torturing nature 



SWIFT 22 1 

was capable of contentment, is not certain ; that for a 
long period of years he was wretched beyond the lot of 
man is evident, and those have not sounded the depths of 
human misery who have not followed in their mysterious 
obscurity the movements of the character of Swift. 

His will was too despotic to yield to his misfortunes ; 
his pride sustained him, and in middle Hfe a fund of restless 
animal spirits. We know but little of his early years, yet 
enough to see that the spkndida bilzs, the scBva indignatio^ 
which ill-health exacerbated, were his companions from 
the first. We cannot begin to comprehend his literary 
work without recognising this. His weapon was ink, and 
he loved to remember that gall and copperas went to the 
making of it. It was in that deadest period, at the very 
close of the seventeenth century, that his prodigious 
talent first made itself apparent W^ith no apprenticeship 
in style, no relation of discipleship to any previous French 
or English writer, but steeped in the Latin classics, he pro- 
duced, at the age of thirty, two of the most extraordinary 
masterpieces of humour and satire which were ever 
written, the Tale of a Tit I? and the Battle of the Books, 
It was not until five or six years later (1704) that he gave 
them together, anonymously, to the press. In the Tale 
of a Tub every characteristic of Swift's style is revealed — 
the mordant wit, the vehement graceful ease, the stringent 
simplicity. To the end of his days he never wrote better 
things than the description of the goddess of Criticism 
drawn by geese in a chariot, the dedication to Prince 
Posterity with its splendid hilarity and irony, the doubly 
distilled allegorical apologue of the Spider and the Bee. 
In his poisonous attacks on the deists, in his gleams of 
sulky misanthropy, in the strange filthiness of his fancy, in 
the stranger exhilaration which seizes him whenever the 



2 22 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

idea of madness is introduced — in all these things Swift 
reveals his essential character in this his first and per- 
haps greatest book. Although every one admired it, the 
Tale of a Tub was doubtle'ss fatal to his ambition, thus 
wrecked at the outset on the reef of his ungovernable 
satire. The book, to be plain, is a long gibe at theology, 
and it is not surprising that no bishopric could ever be 
given to the inventor of the Brown Loaf and the Uni- 
versal Pickle. ' He might explain away his mockery, 
declare it to have been employed in the Anglican cause, 
emphasise the denial that his aim was irreligious ; the 
damning evidence remained that when he had had the 
sacred garments in his hands he had torn away, like 
an infuriated ape, as much of the gold fringe as he 
could. The fact was that, without any design of im- 
piety, he knew not how to be devout. He always, by 
instinct, saw the hollowness and the seamy side. His 
enthusiasms were negative, and his burning imagination, 
even when he applied it to religion, revealed not heaven 
but hell to him. 

The power and vitality of such a nature could not be 
concealed ; they drew every sincere intellect towards him. 
Already, in 1705; Addison was hailing Swift as "the most 
agreeable companion, the truest friend, and the greatest 
genius of the age." We take him up again in 171 1, when 
the slender volume of Miscellanies reminds us of what 
he had been as a writer from the age of thirty-five to 
forty-five. The contents of this strange book name for 
us the three caustic religious treatises, the first of Swift's 
powerful political tracts (the Sacraine?ital Test), various 
other waifs and rags from his culminating year, 1708, gibes 
and flouts of many kinds revealing the spirit of "a very 
positive young man," trifles in verse and prose to amuse 



SWIFT 223 

his friends the Whig Ministers or the ladies of Lord 
Berkeley's family. Nothing could be more occasional 
than all this ; nothing^ at first sight, less imbued with 
intensity or serious feeling. Swift's very compliments 
are impertinent, his arguments in favour of Christianity 
subversive. But under all this there is the passion of 
an isolated intellect, and he was giving it play in the 
frivolities of a compromising humour. 

The published writings of Swift during the first forty- 
four years of his Hfe were comprised in two volumes of 
very moderate dimensions. But if the purely literary 
outcome of all this period had been exiguous, it was now 
to grow scantier still. At the very moment when the 
group of Anne wits, led by Pope and Addison, were enter- 
ing with animation upon their best work, Swift, almost 
ostentatiously, withdrew to the sphere of affairs, and for 
ten years refrained entirely from all but political author- 
ship. His unexampled /^^r;^6?/ to Stella^ it is true, belongs 
to this time of obscuration, but it is hardly literature, 
though of the most intense and pathetic interest. Swift 
now stood ^^ ten times better " with the new Tories than 
ever he did with the old Whigs, and his pungent pen 
poured forth lampoons and satirical projects. The 
influence of Swift's work of this period upon the style of 
successive English publicists is extremely curious ; he 
began a new order of political warfare, demanding lighter 
arms and swifter manoeuvres than the seventeenth century 
had dreamed of. Even Halifax seems cold and slow 
beside the lightning changes of mood, the inexorable 
high spirits of Swift. That such a tract as the Sentiments 
of a Chu7xh of England Alan, with its gusts of irony, its 
white heat of preposterous moderation, led on towards 
Junius is obvious; but Swift is really the creator of the 



224 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

whole school of eighteenth-century rhetorical diatribe 
on its better side, wherever it is not leaden and conven- 
tional. It may be said that he invented a vital polemical 
system, which was used through the remainder of the 
century by every one who dealt in that kind of literature, 
and who was at the same time strong enough to wield 
such thunderbolts. 

That no one, until the time of Burke, who had other 
ammunition of his own, could throw these bolts about with 
anything of Swift's fierce momentum, it is scarcely neces- 
sary to say. His velocity as an antagonist was extraordi- 
nary. He was troubled by no doubt of his own opinion, 
nor by any mercy for that of his enemy. He was the first 
Englishman to realise, in the very nest of optimism, that 
the public institutions of a society could be, and probably 
were, corrupt. In the generation of Shaftesbury this dis- 
covery was really a momentous one. Mandeville made 
it soon after, but to his squalid moral nature the shock 
was not so great as it was to Swift's. That most things 
were evil and odious in the best of all possible worlds 
was a revelation to Swift that exhilarated him almost to 
ecstasy. He could hardly believe it to be true, and 
trembled lest he should be forced to admit that, after all, 
Pope and Shaftesbury were sound in their optimism. 
But his satire probed the insufficiency of mankind in 
place after place, and there gradually rose in Swift, 
like an intoxication, a certainty of the vileness of the 
race. When he was quite convinced, madness was close 
upon him, but in the interval he wrote that sinister and 
incomparable masterpiece, Gulliver s Travels, in which 
misanthropy reaches the pitch of a cardinal virtue, 
and the despicable race of man is grossly and finally 
humiliated. 



ARBUTHNOT: MANDEVILLE 225 

Swift declared that if the world had contained a dozen 
ArbuthnotS; Gulliver's Travels should have been burned. 
The charming physician was not only one of the very 
few persons whom Swift respected^ but of his own gene- 
ration the first to com^e completely under his literary 
influence. If we take the lash out of the style of Swift, we 
have that of John Arbuthnot, who can often hardly be 
distinguished from his friend and master. Without per- 
sonal ambition of any kind, no vanity deterred Arbuthnot 
from frankly adopting, as closely as he could, the manner 
of the man whom he admired the most. As he was a 
perfectly sane and normal person, with plenty of wit and 
accomplishment, and without a touch of misanthropy, 
Arbuthnot served to popularise and to bring into general 
circulation the peculiar characteristics of Swift, and to 
reconcile him with his contemporaries. 

Swift would have been well content to be named with 
Arbuthnot, but to find Mandeville's works bracketed with 
his own would have given him a paroxysm of indignation. 
Yet they were really so closely allied in some essentials 
of thought that it is natural to regard them together. 
Bernard de Mandeville was a misanthropical Dutch 
doctor settled in London, who attacked the optimism of 
Shaftesbury in a coarse but highly effective and readable 
volume called the Fable of the Bees. For twenty years after 
this he was a pariah of the English press, writing odious, 
vulgar, extremely intelligent books, in which he extended 
his paradoxical thesis that private vices are public benefits. 
Mandeville was a daring thinker, who permitted no tradi- 
tional prejudice, no habit of decency, to interfere w^ith 
the progression of his ideas. He was by far the ablest 
of the English deists, and though all the respectability 
of his time dreW away from him, and voted him, like the 



226 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

grand jury of Middlesex^ a public nuisance, he was not 
without his very distinct influence on the progress of 
English literature. He was an emancipator of thought, 
a rude and contemptuous critic of the conventions. In 
himself base and ugly — for all his writings reveal a gross 
individuality — the brute courage of Mandeville helped 
English speculation to slip from its fetters. His style is 
without eLgnnce, but, what is strange in a foreigner, of a 
remarkable homeliness and picturesque vigour. 

Another writer who was kept outside the sacred ring 
of the Anne wits was Daniel Defoe, who comes in 
certain aspects close to Mandeville, but has a far wider 
range and variety. Several dissimilar writers are com- 
bined in Defoe, all, with one exception, of a pedestrian 
and commonplace character. He was in his earlier 
years the very type of what was called ^' a hackney 
author," that is to say, a man of more skill than principle, 
who let out his pen for hire, ready at his best to support 
the Ministry with a pamphlet, at his worst to copy docu- 
ments for stationers or lawyers. In these multifarious 
exercises Defoe was as copious as any journalist of our 
own time, and from 1700 to 1720 had a very large share 
in the miscellaneous writing of the day. The literary 
character which these humdrum productions illustrate 
seems to have been far from fascinating. All that we 
can praise in this Defoe of the pamphlets and journals is 
industry and a sort of lucid versatility. He was a factor 
in the vulgarisation of English, and he helped, in no 
small measure, to create a correct, easy, not ungraceful 
style for common use in the eighteenth century. 

But as he approached the age of sixty, Defoe suddenly 
appeared in a new light, as the inaugurator of a new 
school of English prose fiction. In 1719 he pubhshed the 



DEFOE 227 

immortal romance of Robinson Crusoe, Everything which 
had been written earlier than this in the form of an 
English novel faded at once into insignificance before 
the admirable sincerity and reality of this relation. It is 
difficult to conjecture what it was that suggested to the 
veteran drudge this extraordinary departure, so perfectly 
fresh, spirited, and novel. The idea of the European sailor 
marooned on an oceanic island had been used in 1713 by 
Marivaux in his novel of Les Effets Surprenants, but 
there is no further similarity of treatment. In his later 
picaresque romances Defoe is manifestly influenced by 
Le Sage, but Robinson Crusoe can scarcely be traced to 
French or Spanish models. It was an invention, a great, 
unexpected stroke of British genius, and it was imme- 
diately hailed as such by the rest of Europe. It was one 
of the first English books which was widely imitated on 
the Continent, and it gave direction and impetus to the 
new romantico-realistic conception of fiction all over 
the world. The French, indeed, followed Defoe more 
directly than the English themselves, and his most ob- 
vious disciples are Prevost, Rousseau, and Bernardin de 
Saint- Pierre. It was in his Entile y where he prefers 
Defoe as an educator to Aristotle, Pliny, or Buffon, that 
Rousseau finally drew the full admiration of Europe upon 
Robinson Crusoe. In England, however, the bourgeois 
romances of Defoe long remained without influence and 
without prestige, widely read indeed, but almost furtively, 
as vulgar literature fit for the kitchen and the shop. 

In Defoe and Mandeville we have strayed outside the 
inner circle of Queen Anne wits. We return to its centre 
in speaking of Bohngbroke and Berkeley. With the pro- 
gress of criticism, however, the relative value of these 
two typical eighteenth - century names is being slowly 



2 28 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

but decisively reversed. The fame of Bolingbroke, 
once so universal, has dwindled to a mere shadow. He 
lives as an individual, not any longer as a writer. His 
diffuse and pompous contributions to theistical philo- 
sophy are now of interest mainly as exemplifying several 
of the faults of decaying classicism — its empty rhetoric, 
its vapid diction, its slipshod, inconsistent reasoning. In 
fact, if Bolingbroke demands mention here, it is mainly 
as a dreadful example, as the earliest author in which the 
school which culminated in Pope, Addison, and Swift is 
seen to have passed its meridian and to be declining. 
The cardinal defect of classicism was to be its tendency 
to hollowness, to intellectual insincerity and partisan- 
ship, and this defect is so clearly exposed in Bolingbroke 
that we read him no longer. 

The opposite fate has rewarded the clear and starry 
genius of GEORGE Berkeley. In his own day respected, 
but not highly regarded as a writer, he has gradually so 
strengthened his hold upon us by the purity of his taste, 
that in an age of predominance in prose we regard him 
as a master. In spite of Shaftesbury, Berkeley is the 
greatest English thinker between Locke and Hume, and 
as a pure metaphysician he is perhaps without a rival. 
His person and his character were as charming as his 
genius, and when he came up to London for the first 
time in 1713 he conquered all hearts. Pope expressed 
everybody's conviction when he declared that there had 
been given '' to Berkeley every virtue under heaven." 
He had at that time already circulated his curious hypo- 
thesis of phenomenalism, his theory that what we see 
and touch is only a symbol of what is spiritual and 
eternal — that nothing is, but only seems to be. His 
writings, long pondered and slowly produced, culminated 



BERKELEY 229 

in 1744 in the brilliant and paradoxical treatise on the 
merits of tar-water, which was afterwards called Sii^is. 

Locke had almost removed philosophy outside the 
confines of literature ; Shaftesbury had shown that the 
philosopher could be elegant, florid, and illustrative ; it 
remained for Berkeley to place it for a moment on the 
level of poetry itself. There had, perhaps, been written 
in English no prose so polished as that of Berkeley. 
Without languor or insipidity, with a species of quiet, 
unstrained majesty, Berkeley achieved the summit of a 
classic style. No student of the age of Anne should fail 
to study that little volume of dialogues which Berkeley 
issued under the title of Hylas and Philonous. It belongs 
to the anims mirabilis 1713, when Pope, Swiit, Arbuthnot, 
Addison, Steele, were all at the brilliant apex of their 
genius, and when England had suddenly combined to 
present such a galaxy of literary talent as was to be 
matched, or even approached, nowhere on the continent 
of Europe. 

Theology, which had taken so prominent a place in 
the literature of the seventeenth century, fell into insig- 
nificance after the year 1700. We have already spoken 
of Clarke, a stiff and tiresome writer, but the best of his 
class. To compare Hoadley with Massillon, or Sherlock 
with Saurin, is but to discover how great an advantage 
the French still preserved over us, who had never, even 
in the palmy days of our theology, enjoyed a Bossuet. 
Perhaps the most spirited contribution to religious litera- 
ture published in the early years of the century was 
Law's Serious Call (1729), a book isolated from its com- 
peers in all qualities of style and temper, the work of a 
Christian mystic who seemed to his contemporaries that 
hateful thing ^^ an enthusiast." 



2 30 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The period of English hterature which we have now 
roughly sketched is one of the most clearly defined and 
homogeneous in our history. In its consideration we 
are not troubled by the variety and diversity of its aims, 
by the multitude of its proficients, or by the distribution 
of its parts. All is definite, exiguous ; all, or almost all, 
is crystallised round a single point ; that point is common- 
sense applied to the imagination, to the highest parts of 
man. In all the expressions of this definite spirit, whether 
in Pope or Clarke, in Addison or Berkeley, we find a 
tendency to the algebraic formula, rather than to colour, 
fancy, or fire. In other words, pure intelligence does 
the work of literature, intelligence applied alike to con- 
crete forms and abstract ideas, actively and energetically 
applied, without sentimentality or enthusiasm. The age 
of Anne succeeded in raising this literature of mathe- 
matical intelligence to the highest pitch of elegant re- 
finement. But before it closed there were manifest signs 
of the insufficiency of such a manner to support a complex 
artistic system. 

What in the hands of Pope and Addison was so 
brilliant and novel that all the world was charmed, could 
but prove in those of their disciples cold, mechanical, and 
vapid. There were very dangerous elements in the 
optimism of the time, in its profound confidence in the 
infallibility of its judgment, in the ease with which it had 
become accustomed to rigid rules of composition, in the 
dry light of formalism by which it was so prompt to 
observe art and nature. These might satisfy for a 
moment, might produce a single crop of splendid litera- 
ture, but they bore no fruit for the morrow. Even the 
prevalent admiration of the authors of antiquity was a 
source of danger, for these great fountain-heads of 



THE SCHOOL OF QUEEN ANNE 231 

imagination were regarded not as they really wrote, 
but as seen distorted through the spectacles of the 
French Jesuit critics. The poets of antiquity were 
cultivated as incomparable masters of rhetoric, and on 
the basis of Horace, and even of Homer, there was 
founded a poetry totally foreign to antique habits of 
thought. 

We have not, however, to consider what dangers lay 
ahead of the system, but what it produced in the first 
quarter of the eighteenth century, and for this, within 
limits, we can have little but praise. England now 
joined, and even led, the movement of European nations 
from w^hich she had hitherto been excluded as a barbarian. 
In a ^^ polite" age the English writers became the most 
polite. Pope and Addison had nothing more to learn 
from their Continental contemporaries ; they became 
teachers themselves. In their hands the English lan- 
guage, which had been a byword for furious individu- 
ality and unbridled imaginative oddity, became a polished 
and brilliant instrument in the hands of aru elegant and 
well-bred race. So far, if we go no further, all was well. 
A little group of scholars and gentlemen, closely identified 
in their personal interests, had taken English literature 
under their care, and had taught it to express with ex- 
quisite exactitude their own limited and mundane sensa- 
tions. These were paving the way for a frigid formalism 
which would become intolerable in the hands of their 
followers ; but in their own day, in their brief Augustan 
age, the direct result was not merely brilliant in itself, but 
of an infinite benefit to English as a vehicle for an easy 
and rapid exercise of the intelligence. 



VII 

THE AGE OF JOHNSON 

I 740-1 780 

The period which we have just quitted was one of effort 
concentrated in one middle-class coterie in London^ an 
age of elegant persiflage and optimistic generalisation 
marshalled by a group of highly civilised and ^'clubable" 
\vits. That at which we have now arrived was the exact 
opposite. Its leading exponents were not associates, or, 
in most cases, even acquaintances ; its labours were not in 
any large degree identified with London, but with places 
all over the English-speaking world. P'rom 17 12 to 1735 
attention is riveted on the mutual intercourse of the men 
who are writing, and then upon their works. From 1740 
to 1780 the movements of literature, rather than those 
of men of letters, are our theme. Solitary figures closely 
but unconsciously and accidentally related to other 
solitary figures, ships out of call of one another, but blown 
by the same wind — that is what the age of Johnson 
presents to us. 

If the combination of personal communication, so 
interesting in the earlier age, is lacking now, it is made 
up for to us by the definition of the principal creative 
impulses, which prove, to our curiosity and surprise, in- 
dependent of all personal bias. The similarity betweei 
Swift and Arbuthnot, between Pope and Parnell, is easil 



THOMSON 233 

explained by their propinquity. But how are we to account 
for the close relation of Gray and Collins, who never 
met ; of Fielding and Richardson, who hated one another 
at a distance ; of Butler at Bristol, and Hume at Ninew^ells ? 
This central period of the eighteenth century took a 
wider and more democratic colouring ; its intellectual life 
was more general, we had almost said more imperial. 
Letters could no longer be governed by the dictatorship 
of a little group of sub-aristocratic wits met in a cofTee- 
house to dazzle mankind. The love of literature had 
spread in all directions, and each province of the realm 
contributed its genius to the larger movement. 

In poetry, which must occupy us first, the forces which 
now attract our almost undivided attention are not those 
which appealed to contemporary criticism. Pope and 
his school had given a perfect polish to the couplet, had 
revived a public interest in satire and philosophic specu- 
lation in verse, had canonised certain forms of smooth 
and optimistic convention, had, above all, rendered the 
technique of ^^ heroic verse" a thing which could be 
studied like a language or a science. It was strictly in 
accordance with the traditions of literature that no sooner 
was the thing easy to do than the best poets lost interest 
in doing it. It was Thomson who made the first re- 
sistance to the new classical formula, and it is, in fact, 
Thomson who is the real pioneer of the whole romantic 
movement, with its return to nature and simplicity. 
This gift would be more widely recognised than it is if 
it had not been for the poet's timidity, his easy-going 
indolence. The Winter of Thomson, that epoch-making 
poem, was published earlier than the Diinciad and the 
Essay en Man, earlier than Gullivei^s Travels and the 
Politieal History of the Devil ; it belongs in time to the 
16 



2 34 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

central period of Queen Anne. But in spirit, in 
temper, in style, it has nothing whatever to do with 
that age, but inaugurates another, which, if we consider 
exactly, culminated, after a slow but direct ascent, in 
Wordsworth. 

The positive interest which the poetry of the middle of 
the eighteenth century now possesses for us may be 
slight ; its relative or historical interest is very great. In 
it we see English verse timidly reasserting its character- 
istic qualities and resuming forbidden powers. The 
change was gradual, without revolution, without violent 
initiative. Passion did not suddenly return in its bolder 
forms, but an insidious melancholy shook the pensive 
bosom. For nearly eighty years the visual world, in its 
broader forms, had scarcely existed for mankind ; it was 
not to be expected that shy and diffident poets, such as 
were those of this new period, men in most cases of sub- 
dued vitality, should flash out into brilliant colourists and 
high-priests of pantheism. They did their work gingerly 
and slowly; they introduced an obvious nature into 
their writings; they painted, with a deprecating pencil, 
familiar scenes and objects. With Thomson they re- 
moved the fog that had obscured the forms of landscape, 
with Gray they asserted the stately beauty of mountains, 
with Young they proclaimed anew the magic of moon- 
Hght, with Walpole they groped after the principles of 
Gothic architecture. That their scenes were painted in 
grey and greenish neutral-tint, that their ruined arches 
were supported on modern brickwork, that falsity and 
fustian, a hollow eloquence and a frigid sententiousness 
spoiled many of their enterprises, is not to the point. 
W^e must occupy ourselves, not with what they failed to 
dOj but with their faltering successes. They were the 



THOMSON 235 

pioneers of romanticism, and that is what renders them 
attractive to the historian. 

Nor was it in England only, but over all Europe, that 
the poets of the age of Johnson were the pioneers of 
romantic feeUng and expression. In the two great 
movements which we have indicated — in a melancholy 
sensibility pointing to passion, in a picturesqueness of 
Lmdscape leading to direct nature-study — the English 
were the foremost of a new intellectual race. As a child 
of the eighteenth century, Stendhal, reminded the French, 
^' Le pittoresque — comme les bonnes diligences et les 
bateaux a vapeur — nous vient d'Angleterre." It came to 
France partly through Voltaire, who recorded its mani- 
festations with wonder, but mainly through Rousseau, 
who took it to his heart. Not instantly was it accepted. 
The first translator of the Seasons into French dared 
not omit an apology for Thomson's '' almost hideous 
imagery," and it took years for the religious melancholy 
of Young to sink into German bosoms. But when there 
appeared the Nouvelle Heloise, a great and catastrophic 
work of passion avowedly built up on the teaching of the 
English poets of the funereal school, a book owing every- 
thing to English sensibility, then the influence of British 
verse began, and from 1760 to 1770 the vogue and imita- 
tion of it on the Continent was in full swing. To the 
European peoples of that time Young was at least as 
great an intellectual and moral portent as Ibsen has 
been to ours. 

It was in a comparative return to a sombre species of 
romanticism, and in a revolt against the tyranny of the 
conventional couplet, that these poets mainly affected 
English literature. James Thomson is at the present 
hour but tamely admired. His extraordinary freshness, 



236 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

his new outlook into the whole world of imaginative life, 
deserve a very different recognition from what is com- 
monly awarded to him. The Hymn which closes the 
Seasons was first published in 1730, Vxdien Pope vs^as still 
rising towards the zenith of his fame. It recalled to Eng- 
lish verse a melody, a rapture which had been entirely un- 
known since Milton's death, more than sixty years before. 
We may be told that the close observation of natural 
phenomena which made the four books of the Seasons so 
i.lustrious had never, although scouted or disregarded, 
been entirely lost. The names of Lady Winchelsea, of 
Gay, even of John Philips, may be quoted to prove to us 
that the poets still had eyes, and knew a hawk from a 
hernshaw. But these pedestrian studies of nature had no 
passion in them ; they were but passages of an inventory 
or of a still-life painting. With Thomson, and mainly 
with his majestic Hyiun^ another quality came back to 
poetry, the ecstasy of worship awakened by the aspect 
of natural beauty. We can but wonder what lines 
such as 

'• Ye forests bend, ye harvests -wave, to Himj 
Breathe your still softg into the reaper's heart. 
As home he goes beiieath the joyoics vioon^^ 

could have meant to readers such as Warburton and 
Hurd. We may answer — To them, as to Johnson, they 
could liave meant nothing at all ; and here began the 
great split between the two classes of eighteenth-century 
studen's of poetry — those who clung to the old forms, 
and exaggerated their aridity, down to the days of Hayley 
and Darwin ; and those who falteringly and blindly felt 
their way towards belter things, through Gray, and Percy's 
ReliqucSy and Warton's revelation of the Elizabethans. 
Another powerful innovator was Edward Young, but 



YOUNG 237 

his influence was not so pure as that of Thomson. The 
author of Night Thoughts was an artist of a force ap- 
proaching that of genius, but his error was to build that 
upon rhetoric w^hich he should have based on imagina- 
tion. The history of Young is one of the most curious 
in the chronicles of literature. Born far back in the 
seventeenth century, before Pope or Gay, he wrote in the 
manner of the Anne wits, without special distinction, 
through all the years of his youth and middle life. At 
the age of sixty he collected his poetical works, and ap- 
peared to be a finished mediocrity. It was not until 
then, and after th:it time, that, taking advantage of a 
strange wind of funereal enthusiasm that swept over him, 
he composed the masterpiece by which the next genera- 
tion knew him, his amazingly popular and often highly 
successful Night Thoughts. It w^as in the sonorous blank 
verse of this adroit poem that the vague aesthetic melan- 
choly of the age found its most striking exposition. It 
w^as hardly completed (in 1744) before a prose rival and 
imitation, the ]\Ieditations among tJie Tombs of Harvey, 
deepened its effect and surpassed it in popularity, though 
never approaching it in real literary ability. These two 
books, so pompous, unctuous, and hollow — the one 
illuminated by passages of highly artistic execution, the 
other mere barren bombast — occupied the fancies of 
men for well-nigh one hundred years, surviving the great 
revival, and successfully competing with Wordsworth 
and Keats. 

This sepulchral rhetoric in Miltonic verse, w^hether 
embodied in Young's rolling iambics or compressed into 
the homelier vigour of Blair's Grave, was what passed for 
poetry par excellence one hundred and fifty years ago. 
With this taste the style in grottoes, urns, and tombs 



238 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

closely corresponded, and to this much of the superficial 
character of what was most enjoyed in Gray, Collins, and 
even Goldsmith, may be traced. The great gift of the 
first two of this trio was the renewed elaboration of their 
verse-form. Thomson had revived the beautiful Spen- 
serian measure ; in the Odes of Thomas Gray and of 
William Collins a variety of stanzaic forms illustrated 
a return to pre-Drydenic variety and ease of prosody. To 
a world that scarcely appreciated the meaning of verse 
which was not either a succession of five-beat couplets 
or a mass of stiff blank verse, Gray introduced choral 
measures, richly and elaborately rhymed, full of compli- 
cated triumphal melody ; Collins, at the same moment, 
in a lower key, whispering rather than shouting, fashioned 
his delicate, cold, aerial music. Unhappily, in the middle 
of the eighteenth century everything conspired to drag 
the pioneers of free art back to the bondage of rhetoric, 
and the work of Gray and Collins was instantly retarded 
and parodied by the frosty talent of Akenside, in w^hose 
hands the newly found lyrical fire was turned to ice. 
The impact of Gray on Europe was delayed, but could 
not be suppressed. The Elegy in a Country Churchyard is 
the direct precursor, not only of Chateaubriand, but of 
Lamartine, and is the most characteristic single poem 
of the eighteenth century. 

From 1740 to 1760 the Thomsonian and the Graian 
influences were predominant. About the latter date there 
was a relapse into something of the old Jesuit precision. 
In Churchill and his companions, regardless of the more 
solemn and Latin satire which Johnson had been culti- 
vating, a return was made to the lighter and more primi- 
tive forms which Pope had used. For a moment the 
sombre romantic school seemed swept out of existence, 



OSSIAN 239 

but the popularity of the savage couplets of Churchill was 
brief. All that was left of the reaction was soon seen in 
the modified classicism of Goldsmith, with its didactic 
couplets as smooth and as lucid as Pope's, its humanity 
and grace, its simplicity and picturesque sweetness. In 
the Deserted Village (1770) we have the old kind of 
starched poetry at its very best, and at its latest, since 
after Goldsmith the movement which had begun with 
Pope ceased to possess any real vitality. 

The close of this central period of the eighteenth cen- 
tury was stilted and inefficient in poetry. The rigidity 
of the classical system, now outworn after the exercise of 
one hundred years and more, strangled thought and ex- 
pression, and forced those who desired to write to use 
mere centos of earlier and freer masters. The elegiac 
school had lasted but a very few years ; its successes 
are dated almost exclusively between 1742 and 1760. 
The new poetic feeling, however, never fell into com- 
plete desuetude, for at the very moment when Gray and 
Young were becoming silent, several new forces asserted 
themselves, all moving in the direction of reform in 
taste. Of these the earhest was the revelation, between 
1760 and 1763, of the mysterious paraphrases of Ossian ; 
in 1765 Bishop Percy issued his Reliqiies of primitive 
English poetry ; in 1770 the untimely death of Chatterton 
revealed an extraordinary genius of a novel kind; and 
from 1777 onwards Thomas Warton, in his History of 
English Poetry, was recalling readers to masterpieces of 
art and passion that were not bound down to the rules 
nor dwarfed by the classical tradition. Of all these 
elements the least genuine was undoubtedly the first 
mentioned, but it is equally certain that it was the 
strongest. The vogue of Ossian through all Europe 



240 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

became immense ; no real British writer, not Shake- 
speare himself, enjoyed so universally the respect of 
Europe as the shadowy Ossian did at the close of the 
eighteenth century. Critics of high position gravely 
discussed the relative magnitude of Homer and of the 
author of Fingal, and by no means invariably gave the 
crown to the Greek. The key to the extraordinary suc- 
cess of these Caledonian forgeries is that they boldly 
offered to release the spirit of Europe from its pedagogic 
bondage. No one, not even Goethe, was anxious to 
inquire too closely concerning the authority of frag- 
ments which professed to come to us from an extreme 
antiquity, tinged with moonlight and melancholy, exempt 
from all attention to the strained rules and laws of com- 
position, dimly primitive and pathetically vague, full of 
all kinds of plaintive and lyrical suggestiveness. When 
Napoleon, in 1804, desired to give the highest possible 
praise to a new, modern, brilhantly emancipated, literary 
production, he could find no better epithet for it than 
^^ vraiement Ossianique." And this suggests in what light 
we have to regard Macpherson's forgeries, so irritating 
to our cultivated taste in their bombastic pretentiousness. 
It was not what they were that fascinated Europe, it was 
what they suggested, and the product is what we read in 
Goethe, Byron, Chateaubriand. 

The greatest literary discovery, however, of the middle 
of the eighteenth century was the novel. In late years 
criticism has dwelt more and more seriously on the posi- 
tion of those who practically created the most entertain- 
ing and the most versatile of all the sections of modern 
literature. With due respect to the writers of fiction 
from the sixteenth century down to Defoe and Marivaux, 
it was in the year 1740 that the European novel; as we 



RICHARDSON 241 

understand it, began to exist. The final decay of the 
theatre led to the craving on the part. of Enghsh readers 
for an amusement which should be to them what the 
seeing of comedies had been to their parents, and of 
tragedies to their grand-parents. The didactic pla^^s of 
such writers as Lillo, who lived until 1739, were prac- 
tically the latest amusements of the old school of play- 
goers, who were weary of drama, weary of the old pompous 
heroic story, of chronicles of pseud-Atalantic scandal, of 
the debased picaresque romance. Something entirely 
new was wanted to amuse the jaded mind of Europe, 
and that new thing was invented by the fat little printer 
of Sahsbury Court. Samuel Richardson conceived 
what Taine has called the '' Roman anti-romanesque," 
the novel which dealt entirely with a realistic study of 
the human heart set in a frame of contemporary middle- 
class manners, not in any way touched up or heightened, 
but depending for the interest it excited solely on its 
appeal to man's interest in the mirrored face of man. 

It was a particularly fortunate thing that in this far- 
spreading work of Richardson's he was accompanied by 
several writers who were almost his coevals, who were 
not subjugated by his prestige, but each of whom pushed 
on the same important reform in a province peculiarly 
favourable to himself. In considering the first great 
blossoming of the EngHsh novel, we find that a single 
quarter of a century included all the great novels of the 
age, and that Richardson was neither imitated nor over- 
shadowed, but supported by such wholly original fellow- 
labourers as Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith. 
Each of our first five novelists presented a gift of his own 
to the new-born infant, prose fiction, and we must now 
consider what these gifts were. 



242 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

What was Richardson's addition to literature may be 
described in a condensed form as a combination of art 
in the progress of a narrative, force in the evolution of 
pathos, and morality founded upon a profound study of 
conduct. Of the group, he was the one who wrote least 
correctly ; Richardson, as a pure man of letters, is the 
inferior, not merely of Fielding and Sterne, but of Smol- 
lett. He knows no form but the tedious and imperfect 
artifice of a series of letters. He is often without distinc- 
tion, always without elegance and wit ; he is pedantic, care- 
less, profuse ; he seems to write for hours and hours, his 
wig thrown over the back of a chair, his stockings down 
at heel. But the accidents of his life and temperament 
had inducted him into an extraordinary knowledge of the 
female heart ; while his imagination permitted him to 
clothe the commonplace reflections of very ordinary 
people in fascinating robes of simple fancy. He was 
slow of speech and lengthy, but he had a magic gift 
which obliged every one to listen to him. 

The minuteness of Richardson's observations of com- 
mon life added extremely to the pleasure which his 
novels gave to readers weary of the vagueness, the 
empty fustian of the heroic romances. His pages ap- 
pealed to the instinct in the human mind which delights 
to be told over again, and told in scrupulous detail, that 
which it knows already. His readers, encouraged by his 
almost oily partiality for the moral conventions, gave 
themselves up to him without suspicion, and enjoyed 
each little triviality, each coarse touch of life, each pro- 
saic circumstance, with perfect gusto, sure that, however 
vulgar they might be, they would lead up to the triumph 
of virtue. What these readers were really assisting at 
was the triumph of anti-romantic realism. 



FIELDING 243 

Very different in kind, though of equal value to litera- 
ture, is the gift to his generation of Henry Fielding, 
xMhosQ Joseph Andrews in 1742 succeeds so oddly to the 
Pamela of 1740-41. He also set out to copy human 
nature faithfully and minutely, but his view of life was 
more eclectic than that of Richardson. A much greater 
writer, in his own virile way one of the most skilful of all 
manipulators of English, he is saved by his wider learn- 
ing and experience from the banality of Richardson. 
As Mr. Leslie Stephen has well said. Fielding, more than 
any other writer, gives the very form and pressure of the 
eighteenth century. He is without the sensibility of 
Richardson, which he disdained ; his observation of the 
movements of the heart is more superficial ; he cannot 
probe so deeply into the fluctuating thoughts of woman. 
He has the defects of too great physical health ; he is 
impatient of the half-lights of character, of nervous im- 
pressionability. He can spare few tears over Clarissa, and 
none at all over Clementina ; he laughs in the sunshine 
with Ariosto. He also is a moralist, but of quite another 
class than Richardson ; he is pitiful of the frailties of in- 
stinct, sorry for those who fall from excess of strength. 
Hence, while Richardson starts the cloistered novel of 
psychology, of febrile analysis, Fielding takes a manlier 
note, and deals with conduct from its more adventurous 
side. 

The various qualities of Fielding are seen to successive 
advantage in Joseph Andrews (1742) w^ith its profuse 
humour, in Jonathan Wild (1743) with its cynical irony, in 
Amelia (1751) with its tenderness and sentiment ; but it 
is in Tom Jones (1749) that the full force of the novelist 
is revealed. This was the first attempt made by any 
writer to depict in its fulness the life of a normal man, 



244 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

without help from extraordinary conditions or events, 
without any other appeal to the reader than that made 
simply to his interest in a mirror of his own affections, 
frailties, hopes, and passions. Fielding, in each of his 
works, but in Tovi Jones pre-eminently, is above all things 
candid and good-humoured. He is a lover of morals, but 
he likes them to be sincere ; he has no palliation for their 
rancid varieties. He has his eye always on conduct ; he 
is keen to observe not what a man pretends or protests, 
but what he does, and this he records to us, sometimes 
with scant respect for our susceptibilities. But it has 
been a magnificent advantage for English fiction to 
have near the head of it a writer so vigorous, so virile, so 
devoid of every species of affectation and hypocrisy. In 
all the best of our later novehsts there has been visible 
a strain of sincere manliness which comes down to them 
in direct descent from Fielding, and which it would be a 
thousand pities for English fiction to relinquish. 

By Laurence Sterne the course of fiction was re- 
versed a little way towards Addison and Steele in the 
two incomparable books which are his legacy to English 
literature. We call Tristi^am Shandy (1760-67) and A 
Sentimental Journey (1768) novels, because we know not 
what else to call them ; nor is it easy to define their 
fugitive and rare originality. Sterne was not a moralist in 
the mode of Richardson or of Fielding ; it is to be feared 
that he was a complete ethical heretic ; but he brought 
to his country as gifts the strained laughter that breaks 
into tears, and the melancholy wit that saves itself by an 
outburst of buffoonery. He introduced into the coarse 
and heavy life of the eighteenth century elements of 
daintiness, of persiflage, of moral versatiHty ; he prided 
himself on the reader's powerlessness to conjecture what 



SMOLLETT 245 

was coming next. A French critic compared Sterne, most 
felicitously, to one of the httle bronze satyrs of antiquity 
in whose hollow bodies exquisite odours were stored. 
He was carried away by the tumult of his nerves, and it 
became a paradoxical habit with him to show himself 
exactly the opposite of what he was expected to be. 
You had to unscrew him for the aroma to escape. His 
unseemly, passionate, pathetic life burned itself away at 
the age of fifty-four,, only the last eight of which had 
been concerned with literature. Sterne's influence on 
succeeding fiction has been durable but interrupted. 
Ever and anon his peculiar caprices, his selected 
elements, attract the imitation of som^e more or less 
analogous spirit. The extreme beauty of his writing has 
affected almost all who desire to use English prose as 
though it were an instrument not less delicate than 
English verse. Xor does the fact that a surprising 
number of his '^ best passages " were stolen by Sterne 
from older writers militate against his fame, because he 
always makes some little adaptation, some concession 
to harmony, which stamps him^ a master, although 
unquestionably a deliberate plagiarist. This fantastic 
sentimentalist and disingenuous ideahst comes close, 
however, to Richardson in one faculty, the value which 
he extracts from the juxtaposition of a variety of trifling 
details artfully selected so as to awaken the sensibility 
of ordinary minds. 

If in Sterne the qualities of imagination were height- 
ened, and the susceptibilities permitted to become as 
feverish and neurotic as possible, the action of Tobias 
Smollett was absolutely the reverse. This rough and 
strong writer was troubled with no superfluous refine- 
ments of inslinct. He delighted in creating types of 



246 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

eccentric profligates and ruffians, and to do this was to 
withdraw from the novel as Richardson, Fielding, and 
Sterne conceived it, back into a form of the picaresque 
romance. He did not realise what his greatest compeers 
were doing, and when he wrote Roderick Random (1748) 
he avowedly modelled it on Gil Bias, coming, as critics 
have observed, even closer to the Spanish picaros spirit 
than did Le Sage himself. If Smollett had gone no 
further than this, and had merely woven out of his head 
one more romance of the picaresque class, we should 
never have heard of him. But his own life, unlike those 
of his three chief rivals, had been adventurous on land 
and under sail, and he described what he had seen and 
suffered. Three years later he published Peregrine Pickle 
(175 1), and just before he died, in 1771, Humphrey Clinker. 
The abundant remainder of his work is negligible, these 
three books alone being worthy of note in a sketch of 
literature so summary as this. 

Li the work of the three greater novelists the element 
of veracity is very strong, even though in the case of 
Sterne it may seem concealed beneath a variegated affec- 
tation of manner. In each, however, the main aim, and 
the principal element of originality, is the observation of 
mankind as it really exists. But Smollett was not great 
enough to continue this admirable innovation ; he went 
back to the older, easier, method of gibbeting a peculiarity 
and exaggerating an exception. He was also much in- 
ferior to his rivals in the power of constructing a stor}', 
and in his rude zeal to '* subject folly to ridicule, and 
vice to indignation," he raced from one rough episode 
to another, bestowing very little attention upon that 
evolution of character which should be the essence of 
successful fiction. The proper way to regard Smollett 



SMOLLETT 247 

is, doubtless, as a man of experience and energy, who 
was encouraged by the success of the reaHstic novel 
to revive the old romance of adventure, and to give 
it certain new features. The violence of Smollett is 
remarkable ; it was founded on a peculiarity of his own 
temper, but it gives his characters a sort of contortion 
of superhuman rage and set grimaces that seem mechani- 
cally horrible. When young Roderick Random's cousin 
wishes to tease him, he has no way of doing it short of 
hunting him with beagles, and when it is desired that 
Mrs. Pickle should be represented as ill tempered, a 
female like one of the Furies is evoked. But while it is 
easy to find fault with Smollett's barbarous books, it is 
not so easy to explain why we continue to read them 
with enjoyment, nor why their vigorous horse-play has 
left its mark on novelists so unlike their author as Lever, 
Dickens, and Charles Reade. Smollett's best book, more- 
over, is his latest, and its genial and brisk comicality has 
done much to redeem the memory of earlier errors of 
taste. 

With the work of these four novelists, whose best 
thoughts were given to fiction, were associated two or 
three isolated contributions to the novel, among which 
the Vicar of Wakefield and Rasselas are the most cele- 
brated. Neither Johnson nor Goldsmith, however, would 
have adopted this form, if a direct and highly successful 
appeal to the public had not already been made by 
Richardson and Fielding. These masterly books were 
episodic ; they have little importance in our general 
survey. We judge them as we judge the flood of novels 
which presently rushed forth in all the languages of 
Europe, as being the results of a novelty which the 
world owes to the great English pioneers. The novel, 



248 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

indeed; was the first gift of a prominent kind which the 
world owed to England. The French boudoir novel, as 
exemplified by Ci'6bi\lonJi/s, faded out of existence when 
Richardson rose over the Continent. The lucidity, direct- 
ness, and wholesomeness of this new species of fiction 
made a way for it at once ; within a marvellously short 
space of time all Europe was raving over Pamela and 
Clarissa. The anti-romantic novel swept heroic and 
picaresque fiction out of the field, and it was the un- 
common good fortune of the humdrum old printer to 
prepare the way for Rousseau and Goethe, to be imi- 
tated by Voltaire, and to win the enthusiastic adulation 
of Diderot and of Marmontel, who preferred Sir Charles 
Grandison to all the masterpieces of antiquity. The type 
of novel invented in England about 1740-50 continued 
for sixty or seventy years to be the only model for Con- 
tinental fiction ; and criticism has traced on every French 
novelist, in particular, the stamp of Richardson, if not of 
Sterne and Fielding, while the Anglomania of Rousseau 
is patent to the superficial reader. 

The literature which exercised so wide an influence, 
and added so greatly to the prestige and vital force of 
English manners of thought, is not to be disregarded as 
trivial. The introduction of the novel, indeed, was to 
intellectual life as epoch-making as the invention of 
railways was to social life : it added a vast and inex- 
haustibly rich province to the domain of the imagination. 
The discovery that a chronicle of events which never 
happened to people who never existed, may be made, not 
merely as interesting and probable, but practically as 
t7'ue as any record of historical adventure, was one of 
most far-reaching importance. It was what Fielding 
called ^' the prosai-comi-epos " of the age, invented for the 



JOHNSON 249 

ceaseless delight of those who had tasted the new pleasure 
of seeing themselves as others saw them. The realistic 
novel was as popular as a bit of looking-glass is among 
savages. It enabled our 'delighted forefathers to see what 
manner of men they were, painted without dazzling or 
^'sub-fuse" hues, in the natural colours of life. For us 
the pathos of Richardson, the sturdy, manly sense of 
Fielding, the sensibility of Sterne, the unaffected humanity 
of Goldsmith, possess a perennial charm, but they cannot 
be to us quite what they were to those most enviable 
readers who not merely perused them for the first time, 
but had never conceived the possibility of seeing anything 
like them. That fresh eagerness we never can recover. 

The complex age illustrated by such poets as Young, 
and such novelists as Fielding, found its fullest personal 
exponent in Dr. Samuel Johnson, not the greatest writer, 
indeed, in English literature, but perhaps the most massive 
figure of a man of letters. The gradual tendency of the 
century had more and more come to be concentrated upon 
attention to common-sense, and in Johnson a character was 
developed, of noble intelligence, of true and tender heart, 
of lambent humour, in whose entire philosophy every 
impulse was subordinated to that negative virtue. John- 
son became, therefore, the leading intellect of the country, 
because displaying in its quintessence the quality most 
characteristic of the majority of educated men and women. 
Common-sense gave point to his wit, balance to his 
morality, a Tory limitation to his intellectual sympathy. 
He keeps the central path ; he is as little indulgent to en- 
thusiasm as to infidelity ; he finds as little place in his life 
for mysticism as for coarse frivolity. Vita fuinus, and it 
is not for man to waste his years in trying to weigh the 
smoke or puff it away ; bravely and simply he must 
17 



2 so MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

labour and acquiesce, without revolt, without speculation, 
in ^^all that human hearts endure." This virile hold 
upon facts, this attitude to conduct as a plain garment 
from which the last shred of the Shaftesbury gold-lace 
optimism had been torn, explains the astounding influence 
Johnson wielded during his lifetime. His contempo- 
raries knew him to be thoroughly honest, profoundly 
intelligent, and yet permeated by every prejudice of the 
age. They loved to deal with facts, and no man had so 
large a stock of them at his disposal as Johnson. 

For nearly fifty years Johnson was occupied in literary 
composition. Yet his books are not so voluminous as 
such a statement would lead us to expect. It is doubtful 
whether, with a competency, Johnson would have written 
at all, for he was ponderously indolent, moving slowly, and 
easily persuaded to stop, loving much more to read, to 
ponder, and to talk than to write, and, indeed, during long 
periods of his career unable to put pen to paper. Of his 
principal productions the most famous may be called 
occasional, for they were written suddenly, under a 
pressing need for money, in a jet of violent energy which 
was succeeded by prolonged inertia. He essayed every 
species of composition, and it cannot be said that he was 
unsuccessful in any, according to the estimate of the age. 
His two poems, satires imitated from Juvenal, are less 
" poetical," perhaps, in the recent sense than any writ- 
ings of their reputation in the language, but the solidity 
and sententiousness of their couplets kept them mode- 
rately popular for more than half a century. As an 
essayist, it is less fair to judge Johnson by his Rmriblers 
than by his lighter and less pompous Idlers ; yet even the 
former were till lately habitually read. He lent his 
dignified and ponderous imagination to the task of pro- 



JOHNSON 251 

ducing fiction, and Rasselas takes its place among the 
minor classics of our tongue. Towards the end of his 
life, Johnson came forward four times with a weighty 
pamphlet as completely outside the range of practical 
politics as those of Carlyle. He is also the writer of two 
diaries of travel, of sermons, of a tragedy, of certain 
critical ana — all of them, in the strict sense, occasional, 
and almost unprofessional. 

The only works on which Johnson can be said to have 
expended elaborate attention are his Dictionary^ which 
scarcely belongs to literature, and his Lives of the English 
Poets (1779-81). The latter, indeed, is his magnum opus; 
on it, and on it alone, if we except his reported sayings, 
the reputation of Johnson as a critic rests. This ex- 
tremely delightful compendium can never cease to please 
a certain class of readers, those, namely, who desire intel- 
lectual stimulus rather than information, and who can 
endure the dogmatic expression of an opinion with which 
they disagree. No one turns to Johnson's pages any 
longer to know what to think about Milton or Gray ; no 
one any longer considers that Cowley was the first correct 
English poet, or that Edmund Smith was a great man. 
Half Johnson's selected poets are read no longer, even by 
students ; many of them never were read at all. What we 
seek in these delightful volumes is the entertainment to be 
obtained from the courageous exposition, the gay, bold 
decisiveness, the humour and humanity of the prodigious 
critic, self-revealed in his preferences and his prejudices. 
There are no ''perhaps's" and " I think's ;" all is peremp- 
tory and assertive; you take the judgment or you leave it, 
and if you venture to make a reservation, the big voice 
roars you down. This remarkable publication closes the 
criticism of the century ; it is the final word of the move- 



252 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

ment which had been proceeding since 1660 ; it sums it 
up so brilliantly and authoritatively that immediate revolt 
from its principles was a matter of course. During the 
very same years Thomas Warton was publishing his 
History of English Poetry^ in which all the features were 
found which Johnson lacked — broad and liberal study, 
an enthusiasm for romance, a sense of something above 
and beyond the rules of the Jesuits, a breadth of real 
poetry undreamed of by Johnson. Warton knew his 
subject ; Johnson did not. Warton prophesied of a dawn- 
ing age, and Johnson stiffly contented himself with the 
old. Warton was accurate, painstaking, copious ; Johnson 
was careless, indolent, inaccurate ; yet, unfair as it seems, 
to-day everybody still reads Johnson, and no one opens 
the pages of Warton. 

The extraordinary vitality of Johnson is one of the most 
interesting phenomena in literary history. That the 
greater part of it did not exhale with the fading memory 
of his friends is due to the genius of his principal dis- 
ciple. It has been customary to deny capacity of every 
kind to James Boswell, who had, indeed, several of the 
characteristics of a fool ; but the qualities which render 
the Life of fohnson one of the great books are not acci- 
dental, and it would be an equal injustice to consider 
them inherent in the subject. The life and letters of 
Gray, which Mason had published in 1775, gave Boswell 
a model for his form, but it was a model which he ex- 
celled in every feature. By Mason and Boswell a species 
of literature was introduced into England which was 
destined to enjoy a popularity that never stood higher 
than it does at this moment. Biographies had up to 
this time been perfunctory affairs, either trivial and un- 
essential collections of anecdotes, or else pompous eulogies 



1 



JOHNSON 253 

from which the breath of Hfe was absent. But Mason 
and Boswell made their 'heroes paint their own portraits, 
by the skilful interpolation of letters, by the use of anec- 
dotes, by the manipulation of the recollections of others ; 
they adapted to biography the newly discovered formulas 
of the anti-romantic novelists, and aimed at the produc- 
tion of a figure that should be interesting, lifelike, and 
true. 

It was a very happy accident which made Dr. Johnson 
the subject of the first great essay in this species of por- 
traiture. Boswell was a consummate artist, but his sitter 
gave him a superb opportunity. For the first time, 
perhaps, in the history of literature, a great leader of in- 
tellectual society was able after his death to carry on un- 
abated, and even heightened, the tyrannous ascendency 
of his living mind. The picturesqueness of his dictatorial 
personage, his odd freaks and pranks, his clearness of 
speech, his majestic independence of opinion, went on 
exercising their influence long after his death, and exercise 
it now. Still, in the matchless pages of Boswell we see 
a living Johnson, blowing out his breath like a whale, 
whistling and clucking under the arguments of an oppo- 
nent, rolling victoriously in his chair, often " a good deal 
exhausted by violence and vociferation." Never before 
had the salient points in the character and habits of a 
man of genius been noted with anything approaching to 
this exactitude and copiousness, and we ought to be 
grateful to Boswell for a new species of enjoyment. 

By the side of Johnson, like an antelope accompanying 
an elephant, we observe the beautiful figure of Oliver 
Goldsmith. In spite of Johnson's ascendency, and in 
spite of a friendship that was touching in its nearness, 
scarcely a trace of the elder companion is to be dis- 



2 54 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

covered in the work of the younger. Johnson's style is 
massive, sonorous, ponderous ; enamoured of the pomp 
of language, he employs its heaviest artillery for trifles, 
and points his cannon at the partridge on the mountains. 
The word which Johnson uses is always the correct one 
so far as meaning goes, but it is often more weighty than 
the occasion demands, and more Latin. Hence it was, 
no doubt, that his spoken word, being more racy and 
more Saxon, was often more forcible than his printed 
word. There is no ponderosity about Goldsmith, whose 
limpid and elegant simplicit}^ of style defies analysis. In 
that mechanical and dusty age he did not set up to be 
an innovator. We search in vain, in Goldsmith's verse 
or prose, for any indication of a consciousness of the 
coming change. He was perfectly contented with the 
classical traditions, but his inborn grace and delicacy of 
temper rnade him select the sweeter and the more elegant 
among the elements of his time. As a writer, purely, he 
is far more enjoyable than Johnson ; he was a poet of 
greatflexibility and sensitiveness; his single novel is much 
fuller of humour and nature than the stiff Rasselas ; as a 
dramatist he succeeded brilliantly in an age of failures ; 
he is one of the most perfect of essayists. Nevertheless, 
with all his perennial charm, Goldsmith, in his innocent 
simphcity, does not attract the historic eye as the good 
giant Johnson does, seated for forty years in the undis- 
puted throne of letters. 

Through the first half of the eighteenth century, those 
who speculated with any freedom on the principles of 
religion and on its relation to conduct were loosely 
classed together as deists. In its general denunciation 
of independent thought, the age made no distinction be- 
tween the optimistic rationalists, who proceeded from 



THE DEISTS 255 

Shaftesbury, and philosophic scepticism of a critical or 
even destructive kind. Those who approach the subject 
from the purely literary standpoint, as we do in these 
pages, are in danger of underrating the intellectual im- 
portance of this undermining of faith, because it was con- 
ducted by men whose talent and whose command of 
style were insufficient to preserve their writings. On the 
other hand, all the most eminent and vital authors com- 
bine to deride and malign the deists and to persuade 
us of their insignificance. When we see Swift, in his 
magnificent irony, descend like an eagle upon such an 
intellectual shrewmouse as Collins, whose principal 
modern advocate describes him as ^' ahvays slipshod in 
style and argument, and tedious in spite of his brevity/' 
we think the contest too unequal to be interesting. Nor 
does a brief literary history afford us occasion to dilate 
on such very hackney writers as Toland and Tmdal, 
Whiston and Leslie. 

Towards the middle of the century, however, the habit 
of mind engendered by the humble, but sometimes en- 
tirely sincere, destructive deists, bore fruit in a species 
of literature which they had not dreamed of. There 
can be little question that the progress of critical specu- 
lation, the tendency to take obvious things for granted no 
longer, but to discuss their phenomena and distinguish 
their bases, led to the happiest results in the province of 
history. To the period which we have now reached, 
belong three histories of high rank — all three, as it was 
long believed, of the very highest rank — Hume, Robert- 
son, Gibbon. If modern taste no longer places the first 
two of these in quite so exalted a position as the eic^h- 
teenth century did, each, at any rate, so far surpassed any 
previous rival as to be considered in another class. In 



2 56 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the trio we do not hesitate to recognise the pioneers of a 
new kind of hterature, the earhest scientific historians of 
the EngHsh school. Till 1753, history in England had 
meant no more than the compilation of memoirs ; it was 
now to be a branch of creative literature, carefully con- 
structed and subjected to w^holesome criticism. 

Born in 171 1, David Hume began in 1736 to publish 
philosophical treatises, and in 1741 to be an essayist in 
a broader and less technical field. His studies in the 
British constitution and his inquiries into political pre- 
cedents led him gradually to attempt a History of Great 
Britain from the Union to his own day. The volume 
containing James L and Chai'les L appeared in 1754, and 
produced an extraordinary sensation. Hume's long prac- 
tice in philosophy had prepared him to excel in the 
specious presentment of facts, and the point of view 
which he chose to adopt was novel, and calculated to 
excite a great deal of discussion. His book was read 
with as much avidity as a novel by Richardson or Fielding 
— a result which was aided by the simplicity and elegance 
of his style, which proceeds, limpid, manly, and serene, 
without a trace of effort. The History was concluded by 
a sixth volume in 1762, and Hume lived on for fourteen 
years more, dying in the enjoyment of an uncontested 
fame, as the greatest of modern historians. 

This position it would be absurd to say that he has main- 
tained. Hume had little of the more recently developed 
conscientiousness about the use of materials. If he found 
a statement quoted, he would indolently adopt it without 
troubling to refer to the original document. He was 
willing to make lavish use of the cellections of Thomas 
Carte, a laborious and unfortunate predecessor of his, 
whose Jacobite prejudices had concealed his considerable 



HUME: ROBERTSON 257 

pretensions as an historical compiler. Carte died just 
when Hume's first volume appeared, and this fact per- 
haps saved Hume from some unpleasant animadversions. 
Modern critics have shown that Hume's pages swarm 
with inaccuracies, and that, w^hat is a worse fault, his 
predilections for Tory ideas lead him to do wilful injustice 
to the opponents of arbitrary power. All this, how^ever, 
is little to the point ; Hume is no longer appealed to as 
an authority. He is read for his lucid and beautiful 
English, for the skill w^ith which he marshals vast trains 
of events before the mental eye, for his almost theatrical 
force in describing the evolution of a crisis. If w^e com- 
pare his work from this point of view^ with all that had 
preceded it in English literature, we shall see how emi- 
nent is the innovation we owe to Hume. He first made 
history readable. 

Ten years younger than Hume, there can be no ques- 
tion that William Robertson owed his initiation as a 
writer to the more famous philosopher. In 1759, w^hen 
still a minister in a parish in Edinburgh, he produced his 
History of Scotland, in which he dealt with the half-cen- 
tury preceding the point where Hume began. This was 
the first, and remained the most famous, of a series of 
historical w-orks which achieved a success the incidents 
of which read to us now as almost fabulotis. If the 
record can be believed, Robertson was the British author 
who, of all in the eighteenth century, was continuously 
the best paid for what he wrote. In Robertson the faults 
as well as the merits of Hume were exaggerated. His 
style, with a certain Gallic artificiality, was nevertheless 
extremely brilliant and graceful, and in the finish of its 
general summaries surpassed that of the elder historian. 
But Robertson was still more unwilling than Hume to 



25 8 MODERN ENGLIS.H LITERATURE 

4urn to the original sources of knowledge, still more con- 
tent to take his facts second-hand, and not less superficial 
in his estimate of the forces underlying the movements of 
political and social history. It may be doubted whether 
the exercise of such research as we think inevitable for 
such a task, and as both Hume and Robertson disdained, 
might not have spoiled that brilliant, if always inadequate, 
evolution which so deeply fascinated their contemporaries, 
and may still, for a while, dazzle ourselves. What they 
wrote was not so much history in the exact sense, as a 
philosophical survey of events, in which they thought it, 
not admissible only, but proper, to tincture the whole 
with the colour of their own convictions or political views. 
They were, in fact, empirics, who prepared the world of 
readers for genuine scientific history, and the founder of 
the latter was Gibbon. 

To Edward Gibbon, who timidly deprecated com- 
parison with Robertson and Hume, criticism is steadily 
awarding a place higher and higher above them. He is, 
indeed, one of the great writers of the century, one of 
those who exemplify in the finest way the signal merits 
of the age in which he flourished. The book by which 
he mainly survives, the vast Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire, began to appear in 1776, and was not completed 
until 1788. It was at once discovered by all who were 
competent to judge, that here was a new^ thing intro- 
duced into the literature of the world. Mezeray and 
Voltaire had written in French, Hume and Robertson 
in English, historical works which had charming qualities 
of the rhetorical order, but which did not pass beyond 
the rudimentary stage of history, in which the hasty 
compilation of documents, without close investigation 
of their value, took the place of genuine and inde- 



GIBBON 259 

pendent research. At length in Gibbon, after a Hfe of 
forty years mostly spent in study and reflection, a writer 
was found who united '^ all the broad spirit of compre- 
hensive survey with the thorough and minute patience 
of a Benedictine." After long debate, Gibbon fixed 
upon the greatest historical subject which the chronicle 
of the world supplied ; undaunted by its extreme ob- 
scurity and remoteness, he determined to persevere in 
investigating it, and to sacrifice all other interests and 
ambitions to its complete elucidation. The mysterious 
and elaborate story of the transition from the Pagan to 
the Christian world might well have daunted any mind, 
but Gibbon kept his thoughts detached from all other 
ideas, concentrating his splendid intellect on this vast 
and solitary theme, until his patience and his force 
moved the mountain, and ^' the encyclopaedic history," 
as Freeman calls it, "the grandest of all historical de- 
signs," took form and shape in six magnificent volumes. 

Some modern critics have found the attitude of 
Gibbon unsympathetic, his manner cold and superficial, 
his scepticism impervious to the passion of religious 
conviction. We may admit that these charges are well 
founded, and set them down to the credit of the age in 
which he lived, so averse to enthusiasm and ebullition. 
But to dwell too long on these defects is to miss a 
recognition of Gibbon's unique importance. His style 
possesses an extraordinary pomp and richness ; ill 
adapted, perhaps, for the lighter parts of speech, it is 
unrivalled in the exercise of lofty and sustained heroic 
narrative. The language of Gibbon never flags ; he 
walks for ever as to the clash of arms, under an im- 
perial banner ; a military music animates his magnificent 
descriptions of battles, of sieges, of panoramic scenes of 



26o MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

antique civilisation. He understood, as few historical 
writers have done, how much the reader's enjoyment 
of a sustained narrative depends on the appeal to his 
visual sense. Perhaps he leaned on this strength of 
his styh too much, and sacrificed the abstract to the 
concrete. But the book is so deeply grounded on per- 
sonal accurate research, is the result of reflection at once 
so bold and so broad, with so extraordinary an intuition 
selects the correct aspect where several points of view 
were possible, that less than any other history of the 
eighteenth century does the Decline and Fall tend to 
become obsolete, and of it is still said, what the most 
scientific of historians said only a generation ago, 
^'Whatever else is read, Gibbon must be read too." 

History, fiction, poetry — these were the three depart- 
ments in which the literature of the centre of the 
eighteenth century in England mainly excelled, so far 
as form was concerned, and of these we have now given 
a rapid survey. If we consider philosophy, we must 
revert again to Hume, the leading utilitarian of the 
age, and as a critic of thought without a rival. It is 
difficult, however, to giye to the philosophical writings 
of Hume more prominence in such an outline as this 
than we give to those of Locke, although his- merit as a 
writer on speculative subjects is never quite so negative as 
Locke's. The limpid grace of his style is apparent even 
in a production so technical as the T^^eatise of Human 
Nature. Still less must Hutcheson, Hartley, or Reid 
detain us, prominent as was the position taken by each 
of these in the development of philosophical speculation. 
Philosophy by this time had become detached from belles 
lettres; it was now quite indifferent to those who prac- 
tised it whether their sentences were harmonious or no. 



BUTLER 261 

Their sole anxiety was to express what they had to say 
with the maximum of distinctness. Philosophy, in fact, 
quitted literature and became a part of science. 

Nor was theology more amenable to the charms 
of style. The one great man of religious intellect, 
Joseph Butler, was wholly devoid of literary curiosity, 
and austerely disdainful of the manner in which "his 
thoughts were expressed. When his thought is direct, 
Butler's style is lucid and simple ; but when, as is often 
the case, especially in the Analogy , he packs his sen- 
tences with labouring complexities of argument, he be- 
comes exceedingly clumsy and hard. Butler stood in 
complete isolation, as utterly distinct from his contem- 
poraries as Milton had been from his. But if we descend 
to the commoner ground of theology, we scarcely meet 
with features more appropriate to our present inquiry. 
The controversy of Lowth with Warburton was lively, 
but it was not literature ; the sceptics and the unitarians 
did not conduct their disquisitions with more elegance 
than the orthodox clergy ; while Paley, whose Horce 
PaulincB comes a little later than the close of our present 
period, seems to mark in its worst form the complete 
and fatal divorce of eighteenth-century theology from 
anything like passion or beauty of form. A complete 
aridity, or else a bombastic sentimentality, is the mark 
of the prose religious literature of the time. In the 
hands of Hurd or Hugh Blair we have come far, not 
merely from the gorgeous style of Fuller and Taylor, 
but from the academic grace of Tillotson and the noble 
fulness of Barrow. This decay of theological literature 
was even more strongly marked in France, where, after 
the death of Massillon, we meet with no other noticeable 
name until the nineteenth century opens. It was due, 



262 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

without doubt, to the suspicion of enthusiasm and 
highly strung religious feeling which was felt throughout 
Europe in the generations preceding the Revolution. 

In one department of letters this period was very rich. 
Whether they owed it or no to their familiarity with 
Parisian society and social modes, those strangely assorted 
friends, Gray and HORACE Walpole, exceeded all their 
English contemporaries in the composition of charm- 
ingly picturesque familiar letters. Less spontaneous, 
but of an extreme elegance and distinction, were the 
letters addressed by the fourth Earl of Chesterfield to 
his natural son, a correspondence long considered to 
be the final protocol of good breeding in deportment. 
Of a totally different character were the caustic political 
invectives issued in the form of correspondence, and 
under the pseudonym of Junius, between 1769 and 1772 ; 
but these were letters which gave no pleasure to the 
recipients, and the form of which precluded all reply. 
It is, perhaps, not fair to include Junius among the 
letter-writers, but the correspondence of Chesterfield, 
Walpole, and Gray will certainly bear comparison with 
the best in the same class which was produced in France 
during the eighteenth century. Walpole, in particular, 
excels all the French in the peculiarly Gallic combina- 
tion of wit, mundane observation, and picturesque, easy 
detail. 

We have spoken of the dawn of a revived romanticism 
in poetry. The signs of it were not less obvious in the 
prose of this period. Gray, with his fervent love of 
mountain scenery and recognition of the true sublime, 
is at the head of the naturalists. But great praise is due 
to the topographical Vv^riters who more and more drew 
attention to the forms of natural landscape. The ob- 



LANDSCAPE 263 

servations of Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Gilbert White, 
although made towards the close of the period we are 
examining, were not pubhshed until much later. Gilpin, 
in particular, is a pathetic instance of a man full of appre- 
ciation of natural beauty, prevented by the tradition of 
his time from expressing it ; sensible of the charm of the 
visible world, yet tongue-tied and bound by sterile habits 
of repression. After the seal of a hundred years had 
been set on the eyes and mouths of men, it was not 
suddenly or without a struggle that they could welcome 
and respond to a revived consciousness of the loveliness 
of wild scenery. 

The central portion of the eighteenth century marks a 
progress in the democratisation of literature. The love 
of books and the habit of reading spread rapidly and 
widely through all parts of the country and all ranks of 
society. The world of letters was no longer, as it had 
been in the age of Anne, a small circle of sub-aristo- 
cratic bourgeois who wrote for one another and for the 
polite toilets of London. The capital was no longer 
remarkable for the importance of its literary representa- 
tives ; the life of letters was in the provinces, was 
almost cosmopolitan. English literature now, for the 
first time, became European, and in order to obtain 
that distinction it was forced more and more to cast 
aside its original characteristics and to relinquish its 
insularity. That it did so with effect is proved by the 
very interesting fact that while up to this date we have 
seen England either solitary or affected by Italy or France 
without the knowledge of those powers, we find it now 
suddenly producing the most powerfully radiating litera- 
ture in Europe, and forming the taste of Germany, France, 
and the world. The final actor in the work of fusing the 



264 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Saxon and the Latin literatures in one general style was 
Rousseau, who combined, as Mme. de Stael noted, the 
taste and habits of France with the ideas and sentiments 
of the North. 

The freedom and rough simplicity of English life, 
its energy, its cultivation of truth and sincerity — 
qualities, no doubt, viewed by the Continental Anglo- 
maniacs under too rosy a light, but still, in outHne, re- 
cognisably national — these were what fascinated, in their 
different ways, Voltaire, Prevost, Diderot, and above all 
Rousseau. Conducted by these enthusiasts, the litera- 
ture of barbarous England was received with open arms 
in all the academies and salons of Europe, and a new 
literature was everywhere stimulated into existence by the 
rivalry of such Englishmen as Young, Richardson, and 
Hume. On the other hand, it is impossible to overlook 
the influence of Montesquieu on such English minds as 
those of Gray, Gibbon, and Adam Ferguson ; and the 
Scotch writers, in particular, consciously Gallicised their 
style, in the pursuit of that elegant plausibility which they 
found so charming in French models. These reverbera- 
tions of taste aided one another, and increased the facility 
with which English and Continental readers acquainted 
themselves mutually with the rival literature. But this 
marks a condition of things hitherto unparalleled, and we 
may roughly give the year 1750 as the date at which the 
wall which had from the earliest times surrounded and 
concealed our intellectual products, began to crumble 
down and expose us to the half-admiring, half-scornful 
gaze of Europe. 

This communion with exotic forms of intelligence, and 
the renewed sympathy for antique and romantic forms 
of thought and expression, tended, no doubt, to prepare 



SENSIBILITY 265 

our literature for the revolution which was coining. But 
even so late as 1780 there w^ere few signs of change. 
Individual men of genius forced the language to say for 
them and through them things which had not been said 
before, but the pedagogic shackles were practically un- 
loosened. It was in the insidious forms of "sensibility," 
as it w^as called, the new species of tender and self- 
satisfying pity, that the rigid rules of life were being 
most directly broken. This w^arm stream of sentiment, 
amounting at times to something like enthusiasm, tended 
to melt the horny or stony crust which the recognised 
conditions of thought had spread over every kind of 
literature. Grace, eloquence, intellectual curiosity, dignity 
— all these were still possible under the hard formular 
regime ; but the more spiritual movements of the mind — 
lyrical passion, daring speculation, real sublimity, splendid 
caprice — w-ere quite impossible within a space so cramped, 
and were, as a matter of fact, scarcely attempted. 

When we consider, then, how unfavourable the con- 
ditions w^ere in which literature w^as confined during the 
central years of the eighteenth century, we may marvel, 
not at the poverty, but at the richness of the actual pro- 
duct. If the creation of the novel w^as the greatest 
triumph of the age, it was not its only one. These years 
brought forth a number of men whose intellectual vitality 
was so commanding that it negatived the sterile qualities 
of the soil from which they sprang. If Butler, Gibbon, 
Johnson, and Gray had been born in an age which aided 
instead of retarding the flow of their ideas, their periods 
might have been fuller, their ornament more splendid. 
But so intense was their individuality, so definite their 
sense of what their gift was to the age, that they over- 
came their disabilities and produced work which we, 
18 



266 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

regarding it with deep sympathy and respect, cannot 
conceive being cast in a form more pertinent or more 
characteristic. And it is a sentimental error to suppose 
that the winds of God blow only through the green tree ; 
it is sometimes the dry tree which is peculiarly favourable 
to their passage. 



VIII 

THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 

1780-1815 

The period which immediately preceded and accom- 
panied the French Revolution was one of violent and 
complete transition in English literature. The long frost 
of classicism broke up ; the sealed fountains of romantic 
expression forced their way forth, and then travelled 
smoothly on upon their melodious courses. The act of 
release, then, is the predominant interest to us in a 
general survey, and the progress of liberated romance 
the main object of our study. Poetry once more 
becomes the centre of critical attention, and proves the 
most important branch of literature cultivated in England. 
The solitary figure of Burke attracts towards the condi- 
tion of prose an observation otherwise riveted upon the 
singularly numerous and varied forms in which poetry is 
suddenly transforming itself. As had been the case two 
hundred years before, verse came abruptly to the front in 
England, and absorbed all public attention. 

Among the factors which led to the enfranchisement 
of the imagination, several date from the third quarter of 
the eighteenth century. Johnson's famous and divert- 
ing Lives of the Poets was raised as a bulwark against 
forces which that sagacious critic had long felt to be 

advancing, and which he was determined to withstand. 

267 



268 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The Aristotelian rules, the monotony of versification, the 
insistence on abstract ideas and conventional verbiage — 
the whole panoply of classicism under which poetry had 
gone forth to battle in serried ranks since 1660 was now 
beginning to be discredited. The Gallic code was found 
insufficient, for Gray had broken up the verse ; Collins 
had introduced a plaintive, flute-like note ; Thomson 
had looked straight at nature; then the timid protest had 
given scandal, while Churchill and Goldsmith had gone 
back to the precise tradition. But 1760-70 produced a 
second and stronger effort in revolt, founded on archaistic 
research. Antiquaries had gone dimly searching after 
the sources of Middle English, and Chatterton had forged 
the Rowley poems ; Warton had glorified Spenser, and 
Percy had edited his inspiring Reliques. Most of all, the 
pent-up spirit of lyricism, that instinct for untrammelled 
song which the eighteenth century had kept so closely 
caged, had been stimulated to an eager beating of its wings 
by the mysterious deliverances of the pseudo-Ossian. 

On the whole, this last, although now so tarnished 
and visibly so spurious, seems to have been at that time 
the most powerful of all the influences which made for 
the revival of romanticism in England. Thousands of 
readers, accustomed to nothing more stimulating than 
Young and Blair, reading the Desolation of Balclutha 
and Ossian's Address to the Sun with rapture, found a 
new hunger for song awakened in their hearts, and felt 
their pulses tinghng with mystery and melody. They 
did not ask themselves too closely what the rhapsody 
was all about, nor quibble at the poorness of the ideas 
and the limited range of the imiages. What Gessner gave 
and Rousseau, what the dying century longed for in that 
subdued hysteria which was presently to break forth in 



COWPER 269 

political violence, was produced to excess by the vibra- 
tions of those shadowy harp-strings which unseen fingers 
plucked above the Caledonian graves of Fingal and 
Malvina. Ossian had nothing of position and solid value 
to present to Europe ; but it washed away the old order 
of expression, and it prepared a clear field for Goethe, 
Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand. 

But, in the meantime, four poets of widely various 
talent arrest our attention during the last years of the 
century. Of these, two, Cowper and Crabbe, endeavoured 
to support the old tradition ; Burns and Blake were en- 
tirely indifferent to it — -such, at least, is the impression 
which their work produces on us, whatever may have 
been their private wish or conviction. Certain dates are 
of value in emphasising the practically simultaneous 
appearance of these poets of the transition. Cowper's 
Table Talk was published in 1782, and the Task in 1785. 
Crabbe's clearly defined first period opens with the Can- 
didate of 1780, and closes with the Newspaper of 1785. 
Blake's Poetical Sketches &dXQ from 1783, and the Songs of 
Innocence from 1787. If the world in general is acquainted 
with a single bibliographical fact, it is aware that the 
Kilmarnock Burns was issued in 1786. Here, then, is a 
sohd body of poetry evidently marked out for the notice 
of the historian, a definite group of verse inviting his 
inspection and his classification. Unfortunately, attrac- 
tive and interesting as each of these poets is, it is ex- 
ceedingly difficult to persuade ourselves that they form 
anything like a school, or are proceeding in approximately 
the same direction. If a writer less like Crabbe than 
Burns is to be found in literature, it is surely Blake, and a 
parallel between Cowper and Burns would reduce a critic 
to despair. 



270 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

At first sight we simply see the following general phe- 
nomena. Here is William Cowper, a writer of great 
elegance and amenity, the soul of gentle wit and urbane 
grace, engaged in continuing and extending the work of 
Thomson, advancing the exact observation of natural 
objects, without passion, without vitality, without a trace 
of lyrical effusion, yet distinguished from his eighteenth- 
century predecessors by a resistance to their affected, 
rhetorical diction ; a very pure, limpid, tender talent, all 
light without fire or vapour. Then, here is George 
Crabbe, whom Byron would have done better to call 
'^ Dryden in worsted stockings," a dense, rough, strongly 
vitalised narrator, without a touch of revolt against the 
conventions of form, going back, indeed — across Gold- 
smith and Pope — to the precise prosody used by Dryden 
at the close of his life for telling tragical stories ; a writer 
absolutely retrogressive, as it at first seems, rejecting all 
suggestion of change, and completely satisfied with the 
old media for his peculiar impressions, which are often 
vehement, often sinister, sometimes very prosaic and dull, 
but generally sincere and direct — Crabbe, a great, solid 
talent, without grace, or flexibility, or sensitiveness. 

Then here is William Blake, for whom the classic 
forms and traditions have nothing to say at all ; whose 
ethereal imagination and mystic mind have taken their 
deepest impressions from the Elizabethan dramatists and 
from Ossian ; whose aim, fitfully and feverishly accom- 
plished, is to fling the roseate and cerulean fancies of his 
brain on a gossamer texture woven out of the songs of 
Shakespeare and the echoes of Fingal's airy hall ; a poet 
this for whom time, and habit, and the conventions of 
an age do not exist ; who is no more nor less at home 
in 1785 than he would be in 1585 or 1985 ; on whom 



BURNS 271 

his own epoch, with its tastes and Hmitations, has left no 
mark whatever ; a being all sensitiveness and lyric passion, 
and delicate, aerial mystery. 

And finally, here is ROBERT BuRXS, the incarnation 
of natural song, the embodiment of that which is most 
spontaneous, most ebullient in the lyrical part of nature. 
With Burns the reserve and quietism of the eighteenth 
century broke up. There were no longer Jesuit rules 
of composition, no longer dread of enthusiasm, no 
longer a rigorous demand that reason or intellect should 
take the first place in poetical composition. Intellect, 
it must be confessed, counts for little in this amazing 
poetry, where instinct claims the whole being, and yields 
only to the imagination. After more than a century of 
sober, thoughtful writers, Burns appears, a song-intoxi- 
cated man, exclusively inspired by emotion and the stir 
of the blood. He cannot tell why he is moved. He 
uses the old conventional language to describe the new 
miracle of his sensations. ^' I never hear," he says, '^the 
loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, 
or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in 
an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of 
soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry." This 
is the prose of the eighteenth century; but when the 
same ideas burst forth into metre : 

" T/ie Muse, nae poet ever fajid her, 
Till by himseV he learned to wander, 
Adown some t7'ottmg burn^s meander. 

And 710 think lang J 
O sweet to stray, and pensive po7ider 

A heart-felt sang'^'^ — 

we start to discover that here is something quite novel, 



272 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

a mode of writing unparalleled in its easy, buoyant 
emotion since the days of Elizabeth. 

We have spoken of Burns as he comes to us in the 
sequence of the great poets of Britain. In Scottish poetry 
he takes a somewhat different place. Here he seems not 
one in a chain, but the supreme artist to whom all others 
are merely subsidiary. Scotch Doric verse appears to 
us like a single growth, starting from the rich foliage 
of Dunbar and his compeers, up the slender stem of 
Alexander Scott, of the Sempills, of Montgomery, of Allan 
Ramsay, of the song- writers of the eighteenth century, 
swelling into the fine opening bud of Fergusson, only to 
break into the single aloe-blossom of the perfect Burns. 
All local Scottish verse, from the early sixteenth century 
until to-day, presupposes Burns ; it all expands towards 
him or dwindles from him. If his works were entirely 
to disappear, we could re-create some idea of his genius 
from the light that led to it and from the light that with- 
draws from it. This absolute supremacy of Burns, to 
perfect whose amazing art the Scottish race seemed to 
suppress and to despoil itself, is a very remarkable 
phenomenon. Burns is not merely the national poet 
of Scotland ; he is, in a certain sense, the country itself : 
all elements of Scotch life and manners, all peculiarities 
of Scotch temperament and conviction, are found em.- 
broidered somewhere or other on Burns's variegated 
singing-robes. 

It is obvious that these four great poets of the Eighties 
are not merely ''great" in very various degree, but are 
singularly unlike one another. Cowper so literary, 
Crabbe so conventional, Blake so transcendental, Burns 
so spontaneous and passionate — there seems no sort of 
relation between them. The first two look backward 



CRABBE 273 

resolutely, the third resolutely upward, the fourth broadly 
stretches himself on the impartial bosom of nature, care- 
less of all rules and conventions. It appears impossible 
to bring them into line, to discover a direction in which 
all four can be seen to move together. But in reality 
there is to be discovered in each of them the protest 
against rhetoric which was to be the keynote of revolt, 
the protest already being made by Goethe and Wieland, 
and so soon to be echoed by Alfieri and Andre Chenier. 
There was in each of the four British poets, who illu- 
minated this darkest period just before the dawn, the 
determination to be natural and sincere. It was this that 
gave Cow^per his directness and his delicacy ; it w^as this 
which stamps with the harsh mark of truth the sombre 
vignettes of Crabbe, just as truly as it gave voluptuous 
ecstasy to the songs of Blake, and to the strong, homely 
verse of Burns its potent charm and mastery. 

It w^as reality that was rising to drive back into 
oblivion the demons of conventionality, of '^ regular 
diction," of the proprieties and machinery of composi- 
tion, of all the worn-out bogies with which poetical old 
women frightened the baby talents of the end of the 
eighteenth century. Not all was done, even by these 
admirable men : in Burns himself we constantly hear the 
old verbiage grating and grinding on ; in his slow move- 
ments Crabbe is not to be distinguished from his pre- 
decessors of a hundred years ; Cowper is for ever 
showing qualities of grace and elegant amenity which 
tempt us to call him, not a forerunner of the nineteenth, 
but the finest example of the eighteenth-century type. 
Yet the revolt against rhetorical convention is upper- 
most, and that it is which is really the characteristic 
common feature of this singularly dissimilar quartette; 



274 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and when the least inspired, the least revolutionary of 
the four takes us along the dismal coast that his child- 
hood knew so well^ and bids us mark how 

" Here on its wiry stevi^ i7i rigid bloojn^ 
Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume ; 
Here the dwarf sallows creepy the septfoil harsh, 
A fid the soft, shifty mallow of the marsh^^ 

we observe that the reign of empty verbiage is over, and 
that the poets who shall for the future wish to bring 
concrete ideas before us will do so in sincere and exact 
language. That position once regained, the revival of 
imaginative writing is but a question of time and of 
opportunity. 

A very singular circumstance was the brevity of dura- 
tion of this school of the Eighties, if school it can be 
called. Burns was unknown until 1786, and in 1796 he 
died. Cowper's original productions, so far as they were 
not posthumous, were presented to the world in 1782 
and 1785, and for nine years before his death in 1800, 
he had been removed from human intercourse. Blake 
remained as completely invisible as any one of his own ele- 
mental angels, and his successive collections can scarcely 
be said to have done more than exist, since even those 
which were not, like the Prophetic Books, distributed 
in a species of manuscript were practically unobserved. 
Crabbe had a very curious literary history : his career was 
divided into two distinct portions, the one extending from 
1780 to 1785, the other continued from 1807; from his 
thirty-first to his fifty-third year Crabbe was obstinately 
silent. We may say, therefore, that the transitional 
period in English poetry, hanging unattached between 
the classical and the romantic age, lasted from 1780 to 
1786. During these seven years a great deal of admirable 



ERASMUS DARWIN 275 

verse was brought before the observation of Enghsh 
readers, who had to make the best they could of it until 
the real romantic school began in 1798. In Cowper, 
Crabbe, Burns, and Blake, we look in vain for any exotic 
influence of any importance. Cowper was a good scholar 
and translated Homer, but Greek poetry left no mark on 
his style ; the others were innocent of ancient learning, 
and they were united in this also, that they are exclu- 
sively, almost provincially, British. 

Meanwhile, the old classical tradition did not perceive 
itself to be undermined. If criticism touched these poets 
at all — Blake evaded it, by Burns it was bewildered — it 
judged them complacently by the old canons. They did 
not possess, in the eyes of contemporaries, anything of 
the supreme isolation which we now award to them. 
The age saw them accompanied by a crowd of bards 
of the old class, marshalled under the laureateship of 
Whitehead, and of these several had an air of importance. 
Among these minnows, Erasmus Darwin was a triton 
who threw his preposterous scientific visions into verse 
of metallic brilliance, and succeeded in finishing what 
Dryden had begun. But with this partial and academic 
exception, everything that was written, except in the form 
of satire, between 1780 and 1798, in the old manner, 
merely went further to prove the absolute decadence and 
wretchedness to which the classical school of British 
poetry was reduced. 

It was a happy instinct to turn once more to foreign 
forms of poetic utterance, and a certain credit attaches 
to those who now began to cultivate the sonnet. Two 
slender collections, the one by Thomas Russell, and the 
other by William Lisle Bowles, both of which appeared 
in 1789, exhibited the results of the study of Petrarch. 



276 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Of these two men, Russell, who died prematurely in 
1788, was the better as well as the more promising 
poet ; his Philoctetes in Leinnos is doubtless the finest 
English sonnet of the century. But he attracted little 
notice ; while Bowles was fortunate enough to extend 
a powerful and, to say the truth, an unaccountable 
spell over Coleridge, w^ho doubtless brought to the mild 
quatorzains of Bowles much more than he found there. 
Russell was the first English imitator of the budding 
romantic poetry of Germany. It is necessary to mention 
here the pre-Wordsworthian, or, more properly, pre- 
Byronic, publications of Samuel Rogers — the Poems 
of 1786^ the accomplished and mellifluous Pleasures of 
Memory of 1792, the Epistle to a Friend of 1798. These 
were written in a style, or in a neutral tint of all safe 
styles mingled, that elegantly recalls the easier parts of 
Goldsmxith. Here, too, there was some faint infusion of 
Italiim influence. But truly the early Rogers survives 
so completely on traditional sufferance that it is not 
needful to say more about it here ; a much later Rogers 
will demand a word a little further on. 

But an event was now preparing of an importance in 
the history of English literature so momentous that all 
else appears insignificant by its side. In June 1797 a 
young Cambridge man named Samuel Taylor Cole- 
ridge, who was devoted to poetry, paid a visit to another 
young Cambridge man named William Wordsworth, 
who was then settled with his sister Dorothy near Crew- 
kerne, in Dorset. The Wordsworths had been deeply 
concerned in poetical experiment, and William showed 
to his guest a fragment which he had lately composed 
in blank verse ; we may read it now as the opening of 
the first book of the Excursion. Coleridge was over- 



WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE 277 

whelmed ; he pronounced the poem " superior to any- 
thmg in our language which in any w^ay resembled it," 
and he threw in his lot unreservedly with Wordsworth. 
The brother and sister were then just in the act to move 
to a house called Alfoxden, in West Somerset^ where 
they settled in July 1797. Coleridge was then living at 
Nether Stowey, close by, a spur of the Quantocks and 
two romantic coombes lying between them. On these 
delicious hills, in sight of the yellow Bristol Channel, 
English poetry was born again during the autumn 
months of 1797, in the endless walks and talks of the 
three enthusiasts — three, since Dorothy Wordsworth, 
though she wrote not, was a sharer, if not an origin ator^ 
in all their audacities and inspirations. 

Wordsworth and Coleridge had each published collec- 
tions of verses, containing some numbers of a certain 
merit, founded on the best descriptive masters of the 
eighteenth century. But what they had hitherto given 
to the public appeared to them mere dross by the 
glow of their new illumination. Dorothy Wordsworth 
appears to have long been drawn towards the minute 
and sensitive study of natural phenomena ; William 
Wordsworth already divined his philosophy of land- 
scape ; Coleridge was thus early an impassioned and 
imaginative metaphysician. They now distributed their 
gifts to one another, and kindled in each a hotter fire 
of impulse, A year went by, and the enthusiasts of 
the Quantocks published, in September 1798, the little 
volume of Lyrical Ballads which put forth in modest 
form the results of their combined lucubrations. Mrs. 
S. T. Coleridge, who was not admitted to the meditations 
of the poetic three, gaily announced that ^'the Lyrical 
Ballads are not liked at all by any," and this was, riither 



278 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

crudely put, the general first opinion of the public. It 
is proper that we should remind ourselves what this 
epoch-making volume contained. 

It was anonymous, and nothing indicated the author- 
ship, although the advertisements might reveal that 
Southey, Lamb, Lloyd, and Coleridge himself were of 
the confraternity to which its author or authors belonged. 
The contributions of Wordsworth were nineteen, of 
Coleridge only four ; but among these last, one, the 
Rime of the A7icyent Marinere, was of preponderating 
length and value, '^professedly written," so the preface 
said, ^'in imitation of the style as well as of the spirit of 
the elder poets." This very wonderful poem, Coleridge's 
acknowledged masterpiece, had been composed in Novem- 
ber 1797, and finished, so Dorothy records, on ''a beauti- 
ful evening, very starry, the horned moon shining." A 
little later Christabel was begun, and, in '^ a lonely farm- 
house between Porlock and Lynton " (probably early in 
1798), Kubla Khan. Neither of these, however, nor the 
magnificent Ode to F7^ance, nor Fears in Solitude ^ make 
their appearance in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798. In this 
volume Wordsworth is predominant, and his contribu- 
tions exemplify two of his chief aims in poetical revolu- 
tion. He desired to destroy the pompous artificiality of 
verse-diction and to lower the scale of subjects deemed 
worthy of poetical treatment ; in this he was but partly judi- 
cious, and such experiments as "Anecdote for Fathers" 
and the 'Mdiot Boy" gave scoffers an occasion to blas- 
pheme. But Wordsworth also designed to introduce into 
verse an impassioned consideration of natural scenes 
and objects as a reflection of the com.plex life of man, 
and in this he effected a splendid revolution. To match 
such a lyric as the '^ Tables Turn'd" it was necessary to 



WORDSWORTH 279 

return to the age of Milton, and in the ^^ Lines written a 
Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth somewhat 
shyly sHpped in at the end of the volume a statement of 
his literary creed, and an example of the new manner of 
writing so noble, so full, and so momentous, that it has 
never been excelled, even by himself. 

Thus, in a little russet volume published at Bristol, 
and anonymously put forth by two struggling lads of 
extreme social obscurity, the old order of things literary 
was finally and completely changed. The romantic 
school began, the classic school disappeared, in the 
autumn of 1798. It would be a great error, of course, 
to suppose that this revolution was patent to the world : 
the incomparable originality and value of '^ Tintern 
Abbey " was noted, as is believed, by one solitary reader ; 
the Httle book passed as a collection of irregular and 
somewhat mediocre verse, written by two eccentric 
young men suspected of political disaffection. But the 
change was made, nevertheless ; the marvellous verses 
were circulated, and everywhere they created disciples. 
So stupendous was the importance of the verse written 
on the Quantocks in 1797 and 1798, that if Wordsworth 
and Coleridge had died at the close of the latter year w^e 
should indeed have lost a great deal of valuable poetry, 
especially of Wordsworth's ; but the direction taken by 
literature would scarcely have been modified in the 
slightest degree. The association of these intensely 
brilliant and inflammatory minds at what we call the 
psychological moment, produced full-blown and perfect 
the exquisite new flower of romantic poetry. 

Burns had introduced ^^ a natural delineation of 
human passions;" Cowper had rebelled against "the 
gaudiness and inane phraseology " of the eighteenth 



2 8o MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

century in its decay ; Crabbe had felt that '* the language 
of conversation in the middle and lower classes of 
society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." 
These phrases, from the original preface of 1798, did not 
clearly enough define the objects of Wordsworth and 
Coleridge. To the enlarged second edition, therefore, 
of 1800, the former prefixed a more careful and lucid 
statement of their distinguishing principles. This pre- 
face, extending to nearly fifty pages, is the earliest of 
those disquisitions on the art of verse which would 
give Wordsw^orth high rank among critics if the lustre 
of his prose were not lost in the blaze of his poetry. 

During these last two years of the century the absolute 
necessity for a radical reform of literature had impressed 
itself upon many minds. Wordsworth found himself 
the centre of a group of persons, known to him or 
unknown, who were anxious that ^' a class of poetry 
should be produced" on the fines indicated in ''Tintern 
Abbey," and who befieved that it would be '' well adapted 
to interest mankind permanently," which the poetry 
of the older school had manifestly ceased to do. It 
was to these observers, these serious disciples, that the 
important manifesto of 1800 was addressed. This was 
no case of genius working without consciousness of its 
own aim ; there was neither self-delusion nor mock- 
modesty about Wordsworth. He considered his mission 
to be one of extreme solemnity. He had determined 
that no '^ indolence " should '^ prevent him from en- 
deavouring to ascertain what was his duty," and he was 
convinced that that duty was called to redeem poetry 
in England from a state of ^' depravit}^," and to start 
the composition of ''poems materially different from 
those upon w^hich general approbation is [in 1800] at 



WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE 281 

present bestowed." He was determined to build up a 
new art on precept and example, and this is what he 
did achieve with astonishing completeness. 

In the neighbourhood of the Quantocks, w^here he 
arrived at the very moment that his powers were at 
their ripest and his genius eager to expand, Wordsworth 
found himself surrounded by rustic types of a pathetic 
order, the conditions of whose life were singularly 
picturesque. He was in the state of transition between 
the ignorance of youth and that hardness and density 
of apprehension which invaded his early middle life. 
His observation w^as keen and yet still tender and 
ductile. He was accompanied and stimulated in his 
investigations by his incomparable sister. To them 
came Coleridge, swimming in a lunar radiance of sym- 
pathy and sentimental passion, casting over the more 
elementary instincts of the Wordsworths the distinc- 
tion of his elaborate intellectual experience. Together 
on the ferny hills, in the deep coombes, by ^^ Kilve's 
sounding shore," the wonderful trio discussed, conjec- 
tured, planned, and from the spindles of their talk there 
w^as swiftly spun the magic web of modern romantic 
poetry. They determined, as Wordsworth says, that 
''the passions of men should be incorporated with the 
beautiful and permanent forms of nature." All elements 
were there — the pathetic peasants, the pu:e solitudes of 
hill and wood and sky, the enthusiastic perception of 
each of these, the moment in the history of the countr}^, 
the companionship and confraternity which circulate the 
tongues of fire — and accordingly the process of com- 
bination and creation was rapid and conclusive. 

There are, perhaps, no two other English poets of 
anything like the same importance who resemble one 
19 



282 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

another so closely as do Wordsworth and Coleridge at 
the outset of their career. They were engaged together, 
to a degree which it is difficult for us to estimate 
to-day, in breaking down the false canons of criticism 
which rhetorical writers had set up, and in recurring 
to a proper and beautiful use of common English. In 
so doing and writing in close companionship, interested 
in the same phenomena, immersed in the same scenery, 
it is not extraordinary that the style that each adopted 
strictly resembled the style of the other. This is espe- 
cially true of their blank verse, a form which both 
sedulously cultivated, in which both enshrined some 
of their most characteristic thoughts, and in which 
both were equally engaged in destroying that wooden 
uniformity of pause and cadence with which Akenside 
had corrupted the cold but stately verse of Thomson. 
Who was to decide by whom the '^ Nightingale " and 
by whom the ^'Night-Piece " of 1798 were written? 
The accent, the attitude, were almost precisely identical. 
Yet distinctions there were, and as we become familiar 
with the two poets these predominate more and more 
over the superficial likeness. Coleridge is conspicuous, to 
a degree beyond any other writer between Spenser and 
Rossetti, for a delicate, voluptuous languor, a rich melan- 
choly^ and a pitying absorption without vanity in his own 
conditions and frailties, carried so far that the natural 
objects of his verse take the qualities of the human Cole- 
ridge upon themselves. In Wordsworth we find a purer, 
loftier note, a species of philosophical severity which is 
almost store, a freshness of atmosphere which contrasts 
with Coleridge's opaline dream -haze, magnifying and 
distorting common things. Truth, sometimes pursued to 
the confines or past the confines of triviality, is Words- 



WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE 283 

worth's first object, and he never stoops to self-pity, 
rarely to self-study. Each of these marvellous poets is 
pre-eminently master of the phrase that charms and 
intoxicates, the sequence of simple words so perfect that 
it seems at once inevitable and miraculous. Yet here 
also a very distinct difference may be defined between 
the charm of Wordsworth and the magic of Coleridge. 
The former is held more under the author's control than 
the latter, and is less impulsive. It owes its impressive- 
ness to a species of lofty candour which kindles at the 
discovery of some beautiful truth not seen before, and 
gives the full intensity of passion to its expression. The 
latter is a sort of ^olian harp (such as that with which 
he enlivened the street of Nether Stowey) over which 
the winds of emotion play, leaving the instrument often 
without a sound or with none but broken murmurs, yet 
sometimes dashing from its chords a melody, vague and 
transitory indeed, but of a most unearthly sweetness. 
Wordsworth was not a great metrist ; he essayed com- 
paratively few and easy forms, and succeeded best when 
he was at his simplest. Coleridge, on the other hand, 
was an innovator ; his Christabel revolutionised English 
prosody and opened the door to a thousand experiments ; 
in Kubla Khan and in some of the lyrics, Coleridge 
attained a splendour of verbal melody which places him 
near the summit of the English Parnassus. 

In an historical survey such as the present, it is neces- 
sary to insist on the fact that although Coleridge survived 
until 1834, and WordswOrth until 1850, the work which 
produced the revolution in poetic art was done before 
the close of 1800. It was done, so far as we can see, 
spontaneously. But in that year the Wordsworths and 
their friend proceeded to Germany, for the stated pur- 



284 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

pose of acquainting themselves with what the Teutonic 
world was achieving in hterature. In Hamburg they 
visited the aged Klopstock, but felt themselves far more 
cordially drawn towards the work of Burger and Schiller, 
in vv^hoin they recognised poets of nature, who, like them- 
selves, were fighting the monsters of an old, outw^orn 
classicism. Wordsworth was but cautiously interested ; 
he had just spoken scornfully of '^ sickly and stupid 
German tragedies." Coleridge, on the other hand, was 
intoxicated with enthusiasm, and plunged into a de- 
tailed study of the history, language, and philosophy of 
Germany. Biirger, whose Lenore (1774) had started 
European romanticism, was now dead ; but Goethe 
and Schiller were at the height of their genius. The 
last-mentioned had just produced his WallensteiUy and 
Coleridge translated or paraphrased it in two parts ; these 
form one of the very few versions from any one language 
into another which may plausibly be held to excel the 
original. In the younger men, w4th whom Coleridge 
should have been in more complete harmony — in Tieck, 
in the young, yet dying Novalis, in the Schlegels — Cole- 
ridge at this time took but little interest. The fact is 
that, tempting as w^as to himself and Wordsworth then, 
and to us now, the idea of linking the German to the 
English revival, it was not very easy to contrive. The 
movements were parallel, not correlated ; the wind of 
revolt, passing over European poetry, struck Scandi- 
navia and Germany first, then England, then Italy and 
France, but each in a manner which forced it to be 
independent of the rest. 

For the next fifteen years poetry may be said to have 
been stationary in England. It was not, for that reason, 
sluggish or unprolific ; on the contrary, it was extremely 



WORDSWORTH 285 

active. But its activity took the form of the gradual 
acceptance of the new romantic ideas, the slow expul- 
sion of the old classic taste, and the multiplication of 
examples of what had once for all been supremely ac- 
complished in the hollows of the Quantocks. The career 
of the founders of the school during these years of settle- 
ment and acceptation may be briefly given. At the very 
close of 1800, Wordsworth went back to his own Cum- 
brian county, and for the next half-century he resided, 
practically without intermission, beside the little lakes 
which he has made so famous, Grasmere and Rydal. 
Here, after marrying in 1802, he lived in great sim- 
plicity and dignity, gradually becoming the centre of a 
distinguished company of admirers. From 1799 to 1805 
he was at work on the Prelude, a didactic poem in which 
he elaborated his system of natural religion ; and he 
began at Grasmere to use the sonnet with a persistent 
mastery and with a freedom such as it had not known 
since the days of Milton. In 1814 the publication of 
the Excursion made a great sensation, at first not wholly 
favourable, and gave to the service of Wordsworth some 
of the pleasures of martyrdom. In 181 5 the poet col- 
lected his lyrical writings. 

This date, 18 14-15, therefore, is critical in the career 
of Wordsworth : it forced his admirers and his de- 
tractors alike to consider what was the real nature of 
the innovation which he had introduced, and to what 
extreme it could be pushed. In 1815 he once more 
put forth his views on the art of verse in a brilliant 
prose essay, w^iich may be regarded as his final, or 
at least maturest utterance on the subject. At this 
moment a change came over the aspect of his genius : 
he was now forty-five years of age, and the freshness 



286 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of his voice, which had lasted so long, was beginning 
to fail. He had a brief Virgilian period, when he wrote 
^'Laodamia" and ''Dion," and then the beautiful talent 
hardened into rhetoric and sing-song. Had Wordsworth 
passed away in 1815 instead of 1850, English literature 
had scarcely been the poorer. Of Coleridge there is even 
less to be said. His career was a miserable tissue of 
irregularity, domestic discord, and fatal indulgence in 
opium. In 181 2 he recast his old drama of Osorio as 
Remorse y a fine romantic tragedy on Jacobean lines. He 
was occasionally adding a few lines to the delicious 
pamphlet of poetry which at length found a publisher 
in 18 17 as Sibylline Leaves. Yet even here, all that was 
really important had been composed before the end of 
the eighteenth century. Save for one or two pathetic 
and momentary revivals of lyric power, Coleridge died 
as a poet before he was thirty. 

The name of Robert Southey has scarcely been men- 
tioned yet, although it is customary to connect, it indis- 
solubly with those of his great friends. He was slightly 
younger than they, but more precocious, and as early as 
1793 he somewhat dazzled them by the success of his Joan 
of Arc, From that time forth until shortly before his 
death, in 1843, Southey never ceased to write. He was 
always closely identified in domestic relations with Words- 
>vorth, whose neighbour he was in the Lakes for forty 
years, and with Coleridge, who was his brother-in-law. 
He early accepted what we may call the dry bones of the 
romantic system, and he published a series of ambitious 
epics — Thalaba, in 1801 ; MadoCy in 1805 ; Kehama^ in 
1810 ; Roderick^ in 1814 — which he intended as contri- 
butions to the new poetry. His disciple and latest 
unflinching admirer, Sir Henry Taylor, has told us that 



CAMPBELL 287 

Southe}^ ^' took no pleasure in poetic passion " — a melan- 
choly admission. We could have guessed as much from 
his voluminous and vigorous writing, from which ima- 
gination is conspicuously absent, though eloquence, 
vehemence, fluency, and even fancy are abundant. The 
best part of Southey was his full admiration of some 
aspects of good literature, and his courageous support 
of unpopular specimens of these. When Wordsworth 
was attacked, Southey said, in his authoritative way, '' A 
greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been, 
nor ever will be." He supported the original romantic 
movement by his praise, his weighty personality, the 
popular character of his contributions. But he added 
nothing to it; he could not do so, since, able and 
effective man of letters as he was, Southey was not, in 
any intelligible sense, himself a poet. 

W^hat effect the new ideas could produce on a per- 
fectly ductile fancy may be observed in a very interesting 
w^ay in the case of Thomas Campbell. This young 
Scotchman, born in 1777, had evidently seen no poetry 
more modern than that of Johnson, Goldsmith, and 
Rogers, when he published his Pleasures of Hope'in 1799. 
The very name of this work discovered its adhesion to 
eighteenth-century tradition. It was a tame, '' correct " 
essay, in a mode already entirely outworn. As a student 
it had been Campbell's pride to be styled ^'the Pope of 
Glasgow." When he became aware of them, he rejected 
all the proposed reforms of Wordsworth, whose work he 
continued to detest throughout his life ; but in 1800 he 
proceeded to Germany, where he fell completely under 
the spell of the romantic poets of that nation, and in 
1803 gave to the world ^' Lochiel," ^' Hohenlinden," and 
the " Exile of Erin." These were succeeded by other 



288 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

spirited ballads, amatory and martial, and in 1809 by a 
romantic epic in Spenserian stanza, Gertrude of Wyoming^ 
in which Campbell's style is wholly Teutonised. After 
this Campbell wrote little that was readable, and his 
fame, once far greater than that of Coleridge and Words- 
worth, has now dwindled to an unjust degree. He had a 
remarkable gift for lucid, rapid, and yet truly poetical 
narrative ; his naval odes or descants, the ^^ Battle of the 
Baltic" and '^ Ye Mariners of England," are without rivals 
in their own class, and Campbell deserves recognition as 
a true romanticist and revolutionary force in poetry, 
although fighting for his own hand, and never under the 
flag of Wordsworth and Coleridge. For the time being, 
however, Campbell did more than they — more, perhaps, 
than any other writer save one — to break down in popular 
esteem the didactic convention of the classic school. 

A still greater force in popularising and fixing the 
romantic tradition was Sir Walter Scott in the poetry 
of his early middle life — that is to say, from 1799 to 
18 1 4. From the dawn of childhood he had shown an 
extraordinary passion for listening to chivalrous and 
adventurous tales, and for composing the like. He was 
fortunate enough to see and to be greatly moved by 
Burns ; and as he advanced, the intense Scotticism of his 
nature was emphasised by the longing to enshrine Scotch 
prowess and nature in picturesque verse. The mode in 
which this was to be done had not even dimly occurred 
to him, when he met with that lodestar of romanticism, 
the Lenore of Burger ; he translated it, and was led to 
make fresh eager inroads into German poetry, with which 
he was much more in sympathy than Wordsworth was, 
or even Coleridge. As early as 1799 Scott published a 
version of Goetz von Berlichingen* Even Goethe, how- 



\ 



SIR WALTER SCOTT 289 

ever, did not at this time persuade Scott to make a deep 
study of literature ; he was still far more eager to learn 
in the open school of experience. He imitated a few 
German ballads, and he presently began to collect the 
native songs of his own country ; the far-reaching result 
was the publication of the Scottish Minstrelsy (1802). 

Still, nothing showed that Walter Scott was likely to 
become an original writer, and he was thirty-four when 
Europe was electrified with the appearance of the Lay of 
the Last Minsti^el in 1805. Then followed Marmion in 
1808, the Lady of the Lake in 1810, and the Loj-d of 
the Lsles in 1815, not to speak of other epical narratives 
which were not so successful. Meanwhile, the publica- 
tion of Waverley, in 1814, opened another and a still 
more splendid door to the genius of Scott, and he 
bade farewell to the Muses. But from 1805 to 181 5 he 
was by far the most prominent British poet; as Words- 
worth put it, Scott was '^ the whole world's darling," arid 
no one, perhaps, before or since, has approached the 
width and intensity of his popularity. While Words- 
worth distributed a few hundreds of his books, and 
Coleridge could not induce his to move at all, Scott's 
poetry sold in tens of thousands, and gave the tone to 
society. At the present day something of the charm 
of Scott's verse-narratives has certainly evaporated ; they 
are read for the story, a fatal thing to confess about 
poetry. The texture of Scott's prosody is thinner and 
looser than that of his great contemporaries, nor are 
his reflections so penetrating or so exquisite as the 
best of theirs. Nevertheless, the divine freshness and 
exuberance of Scott are perennial in several of his 
episodes, and many of his songs are of the highest 
positive excellence. Perhaps if he had possessed a more 



290 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

delicate ear, a subtler sense of the phases of landscape, 
something of that mysticism and passion which we un- 
willingly have to admit that we miss in his poetry, he 
might not have interpreted so lucidly to millions of 
readers the principles of the romantic revival. With 
his noble disregard of self, he bade those who sought 
the higher qualities find them in Wordsworth ; but Scott 
also, with his vigour of invention and his masculine sense 
of flowing style, took a prominent and honourable part 
in the reformation of English poetry. 

These, then, were the influences at work during 
the fifteen years with which the century opened, and 
so completely was the old tradition overcome that 
poetry of the class of Johnson and Pope abruptly 
ceased, not, indeed, to be admired, but to be composed. 
A little group of pious writers, of whom Bloomfield and 
Grahame may be named, endeavoured to keep blank 
verse and the heroic couplet as they had received it 
from their Thomsonian forefathers. But although the 
Farmer s Boy (1798) and the Sabbath (1802) had many 
imitators and enjoyed a preposterous popularity, their 
influence was quite outside the main channels of literary 
activity. The critics stormed against the reforms intro- 
duced by Wordsworth, and ridiculed his splendid experi- 
ments. But after the preface of 1800 nobody who had 
any genuine poetic gift could go on writing in the 
eighteenth-century way, and, as a curious matter of 
fact, no one except the satirists did attempt to do so. 

But it is time to turn to the condition of prose, which, 
however, offers us at this juncture in our history fewer 
phenomena of importance. The one great prose-writer of 
the close of the eighteenth century was Edmund Burke, 
and his peculiarities are to be studied to best effect in what 



BURKE 291 

he wrote between 1790 and his death in 1797. Burke is 
therefore strictly transitional^ and it is not less rational 
to consider him as the forerunner of De Quincey than 
as the successor of Robertson and Gibbon. He is really 
alone in the almost extravagant splendour of his oratory, 
too highly coloured for the eighteenth century, too hard 
and resonant for the nineteenth. When Burke is at his 
best, as for instance in the Letter to a Noble Lord of 1796, 
it is difficult to admit that any one has ever excelled him 
in the melody of his sentences, the magnificence of his 
invective, the trumpet-blast of his sonorous declamation. 
It is said that Burke endeavoured to mould his style on 
that of Dryden. No resemblance between the richly 
brocaded robes of the one and the plain russet of the 
other can be detected. It is not quite certain that the 
influence of Burke on succeeding prose has been alto- 
gether beneficial ; he has seemed to encoujage a kind of 
hollow vehemence, an affectation of the '^ grand style " 
which in less gifted rhetoricians has covered poverty of 
thought. We must take Burke as he is, without com- 
paring him with others ; he is the great exception, the 
man essentially an orator whose orations were yet litera- 
ture. There is an absence of emotional imagination, 
however, in Burke which is truly typical of the rhetor. 
In this, as in so much else, Burke is seen stih to belong 
to the eighteenth century. He died just when the young 
folks in Western Somerset were working out their revo- 
lutionary formulas in verse ; he missed even the chance 
of having these presented to his attention. We may be 
absolutely certain, however, that he would have rejected 
them with as much scorn and anger as he evinced for the 
political principles of the French Revolution. Whoever 
might have smiled on Goody Blake and Betty Foy, it 



292 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

would not have been the fierce and inflexible author of 
the letters O71 a Regicide Peace, 

It was, perhaps, a fortunate thing for literature that 
Burke should die at that juncture and at the meridian 
of his powers. His last Tracts sum up the prose of 
the century with a magnificent burst of sincere and 
transcendent ardour. He retains the qualities which 
had adorned the dying age, its capacity in the manipu- 
lation of abstract ideas, its desire for the attainment 
of intellectual truth, its elegant and persuasive sobriety, 
its limited but exquisitely balanced sense of literary 
form. But Burke was a statesman too, and here he 
turns away from his eighteenth-century predecessors ; 
he will be bound by no chains of abstract reasoning. 
Theories of politics were to him '^ the great Serbonian 
bog " ; he refused to listen to metaphysical discussions ; 
when he was dealing with American taxation, " I hate 
the very sound of them," he said. As he grew older, his 
mind, always moving in the train of law and order, grew 
steadily more and more conservative. He rejected the 
principles of Rousseau with scorn, and when there arose 
before him a ^'vast, tremendous, unformed spectre " in 
the far more terrific guise of the French Revolution, 
Burke lost not a little of his self-command. He died 
with the prophetic shrieks of the Regicide Peace still 
echoing in men's ears ; he died without a gleam of hope 
for England or for Europe, his intellect blazing at its 
highest incandescence in what he believed to be the 
deepening twilight of the nations. 

Against Burke there wrote the revolutionary rhetori- 
cians, those who saw the colours of dawn, not of sunset, in 
the blood-red excesses of the French. Richard Price and 
Joseph Priestley were the leaders of this movement in idea; 



GODWIN 293 

but in style they remained heavy and verbose, handing 
down the heritage of Locke to Bentham and Godwin. 
Priestley, after, in 179I; having his house wrecked and his 
scientific instruments destroyed, as a popular punishment 
for his sympathy with the Revolution, lived on until 1804 
to see something like a justification of his prophecies. 
These men were the pathetic victims of Burke's splendid 
indignation, but in 1791 a direct attack on the Reflections 
took up the cudgels in defence. This was the once- 
famous Rights of Man y by Tom Paine, an audacious work, 
the circulation of which was so enormous that it had 
a distinct effect in colouring public opinion. A sturdier 
and. more modern writer of the same class was William 
Godwin, whose Political Justice (1793) shows a great 
advance in lucidity and command of logical language. 
He has been compared, surely to his own moral ad- 
vantage, with Condorcet ; but there is no question that 
he was curiously related to the French precursors of the 
Revolution, and particularly to Rousseau and Helvetius, 
from whom he caught, with their republican ardour, not 
a little of the clear merit of their style. 

The spirit of change was everywhere in the air, and it 
showed itself in the field of diverting Hterature no less 
than in that of political controversy. The growth of 
medieevalism in fiction has been traced back to Horace 
Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), where the supernatural 
was boldly introduced into pseudo- Gothic romance. 
This innovation was greatly admired, and presently, 
having been reinforced by the influence of German neo- 
medi^eval narrative, was copiously imitated. In the last 
decade of the eighteenth century, Mrs. Radcliffe, M. G. 
Lewis, and Beckford, presently followed by Maturin, 
founded what has been called the School of Terror, in 



294 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the form of romantic novels in which fear was treated as 
the dominant passion. These ^^ bogey " stories were very 
widely appreciated, and they served both to free the 
public mind from the fetters of conventional classic 
imagery, and to prepare it to receive impressions of 
enthusiasm and wonder. After having been shut up for 
more than a hundred years in the cage of a sort of 
sceptical indifferentism, the nature of man was blinded 
by the light of liberty, and staggered about bewildered by 
very strange phenomena. These crude romance-writers 
had a definite and immediate influence on the poets with 
whom the beginning of the next chapter will deal, but 
they also affected the whole future of English prose 
romance. 

The Revolutionists created, mainly in order to impress 
their ideas more easily upon the public, a school of fiction 
which is interesting as leading in the opposite direction 
from Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin, namely, towards the 
realistic and philosophical novel as we know it to-day. 
Bage, Hannah More, Holcroft, and even Godwin are 
not read any longer, and may be considered as having 
ceased to occupy any prominent position in our litera- 
ture. But they form a valuable link between Fielding 
and Smollett on the one hand, and Jane Austen and the 
modern naturalistic school on the other. When the age 
was suddenly given over to sliding panels and echoing 
vaults, and the touch in the dark of ^' the mealy and 
carious bones of a skeleton," these humdrum novelists 
restored the balance of common-sense and waited for a 
return to sanity. The most difficult figure to fit in to 
any progressive scheme of English fiction is Frances 
BuRNEY, who was actually alive with Samuel Richardson 
and with Mr. George Meredith. She wrote seldom, and 



JANE AUSTEN 295 

published at long intervals ; her best novels, founded on 
a judicious study of Marivaux and Rousseau, implanted on 
a strictly British soil, were produced a little earlier than 
the moment we have now reached. Yet the Wanderer 
was published simultaneously with Waverley. She is a 
social satirist of a very sprightly order, whose early 
Evelina and Cecilia were written with an ease which she 
afterwards unluckily abandoned for an aping of the pom- 
posity of her favourite lexicographer. Miss Burney was 
a dehghtful novelist in her youth, but she took no part 
in the progressive development of English literature. 

In 1800 Maria Edgeworth opened, with Castle Rack- 
nntj the long series of her popular, moral, and fashion- 
able tales. Their local colouring and distinctively Irish 
character made them noticeable; but even the warm 
praise of Scott and the more durable value of her stories 
for children have not prevented Miss Edgeworth from 
becoming obsolete. She prepares the way for the one 
prose-wTiter of this period whose genius has proved 
absolutely perdurable, who holds no lower a place in 
her own class than is held in theirs by Wordsworth, 
Coleridge, and Scott — for that impeccable Jane Austen, 
whose fame becomes every day more inaccessible to the 
devastating forces of time and shifting fashion. It has 
long been seen, it was noted even by Macaulay, that the 
only writer with whom Jane Austen can fairly be com- 
pared is Shakespeare. It is obvious that she has nothing 
of his width of range or sublimity of imagination ; she 
keeps herself to that two-inch square of ivory of which 
she spoke in her proud and simple w^ay. But there is no 
other English writer who possesses so much of Shake- 
speare's inevitabihty, or who produces such evidence of a 
like omniscience. Like Balzac, like Tourgenieff at his best, 



296 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Jane Austen gives the reader an impression of knowing 
everything there was to know about her creations^ of being 
incapable of error as to their acts, thoughts, or emotions. 
She presents an absolute illusion of reality ; she exhibits 
an art so consummate that we mistake it for nature. She 
never mixes her own temperament with those of her 
characters, she is never swayed by them, she never 
loses for a moment her perfect, serene control of them. 
Among the creators of the world, Jane Austen takes a 
place that is with the highest and that is purely her own. 
The dates of publication of Miss Austen's novels are 
misleading if we wish to discover her exact place in the 
evolution of English literature. Astounding as it appears 
to-day, these incomparable books were refused by pub- 
lishers from whose shops deciduous trash was pouring 
week by week. The vulgar novelists of the Minerva 
Press, the unspeakable Musgraves and Roches and Rosa 
Matildas, sold their incredible romances in thousands, 
while Pride and Prejudice went a-begging in MS. for 
nearly twenty years. In point of fact the six immortal 
books were written between 1796 and 1810, although 
their dates of issue range from 181 1 to 1818. In her 
time of composition, then, she is found to be exactly the 
contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge in their re- 
form of poetry, instead of impinging on the career of Sir 
Walter Scott as a romance-writer. Her methods, how- 
ever, in no degree resemble those of the poets, and she 
has no conscious lesson of renaissance to teach. She 
does not share their interest in landscape ; with her the 
scenery is a mere accessory. If she is with them at all, it 
is in her minute adherence to truth, in her instinctive 
abhorrence of anything approaching rhetoric, in her 
minute observation and literary employment of the detail 



THE EDINBURGH REVIEW 297 

of daily life. It is difficult to say that she was influenced 
by any predecessor, and, most unfortunately, of the 
history of her mind we know almost nothing. Her re- 
serve was great, and she died before she had become an 
object of curiosity even to her friends. But we see that 
she is of the race of Richardson and Marivaux, although 
she leaves their clumsy construction far behind. She 
was a satirist, however, not a sentimentalist. One of the 
few anecdotes preserved about her relates that she refused 
to meet Madame de Stael, and the Germanic spirit was 
evidently as foreign to her taste as the lyricism born of 
Rousseau. She was the exact opposite of all which the 
cosmopolitan critics of Europe were deciding that Eng- 
lish prose fiction was and always would be. Lucid, gay, 
penetrating, exquisite, Jane Austen possessed precisely 
the qualities that English fiction needed to drag it out of 
the Slough of Despond and start it wholesomely on a 
new and vigorous careen 

One curious result of the revolution in literary taste 
was the creation of an official criticism mainly intended 
to resist the new ideas, and, if possible, to rout them. 
The foundation of the Edinburgh Review in 1802 is a 
remarkable landmark in the history of English literature. 
The proposition that a literary journal should be started 
which should take the place of the colourless Monthly 
Review was made by Sydney Smith, but Francis Jeffrey, 
a young Scotch advocate, was editor from the first, and 
held the post for six-and-twenty years. He was a half- 
hearted supporter of the Scoto-Teutonic reformers, but 
a vehement opponent, first of Coleridge and Wordsworth, 
afterwards of Shelley and Keats. The finer raptures of 
poetry were not revealed to Jeffrey, and in the criticism 
of t]:eir contemporaries he and his staiT w^ere often guilty 
20 



2g^ MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of extraordinary levity. Yet, on the whole, and where 
the prejudices of the young reviewers were not involved, 
the Edinburgh did good work, and it created quite a new 
standard of merit in periodical writing. To counteract 
its Whiggishness the Ministerial party founded in 1809 
the Tory Quarterly Review y and put that bitter pedant and 
obscurantist, Giff ord, in the editorial chair. This periodical 
also enjoyed a great success without injuring its rival, 
which latter, at the close of the period with which we are 
dealing, had reached the summit of its popularity and a 
circulation in those days quite unparalleled. Readers of 
the early numbers of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly 
will to-day be surprised at the emotion they caused and 
the power which they wielded. They are often smart, 
sometimes witty, rarely sound, and the style is, as a rule, 
pompous and diffuse. The modern reader is irritated by 
the haughty assumption of these boyish reviewers, who 
treat genius as a prisoner at the bar, and as in all pro- 
bability a guilty prisoner. The Quarterly was in this re- 
spect a worse sinner even than the Edinburgh : if Jeffrey 
worried the authors, Gifford positively bit them. This 
unjust judging of literature, and particularly of poetry — 
what is called the ^^ slashing " style of criticism — when it 
is now revived, is usually still prosecuted on the lines laid 
down by Jeffrey and Gifford. It gives satisfaction to the 
reviewer, pain to the author, and a faint amusement to 
the public. It has no effect whatever on the ultimate 
position of the book reviewed, but, exercised on occasion, 
it is doubtless a useful counter-irritant to thoughtless 
or venal eulogy. If so, let the credit be given to the 
venerable Blue-and-yellow and Brown Reviews. 

A book which is little regarded to-day exercised so 
wide and so beneficial an influence on critical thought 



SIR WALTER SCOTT 299 

at the beginning of the century that it seems imperative 
to mention it here. The Curiosities of Literature^ by Isaac 
D'IsraeH, was not a masterpiece, but its storehouses of 
anecdote and cultivated reflection must have familiarised 
with the outlines of literary history thousands who would 
have been repelled by a more formal work. We dare 
not speak here at any length of Cobbett and Combe, of 
Bentham and Dugald Stewart, of Horner and Mackintosh 
and Mary Wollstonecraft, Of all these writers, in their 
various ways, it may safely be said that their ideas were 
of more importance than their style, and that, interesting 
as they .may severally be, they do not illustrate the 
evolution of English literature. 

During the later years of this period romantic fiction 
fell into great decay. Out of its ashes sprung the histori- 
cal novel, the invention of which was boldly claimed 
by Miss Jane Porter, whose Thaddeus of Warsaw^ long 
cherished by our great-grandfathers, and not entirely 
unknown to our fathers, had some faint merit. Other 
ladies, with the courage of their sex, but with remarkably 
little knowledge of the subject, attacked the muse of 
history. But nothing was really done of importance 
until Sir WALTER ScOTT turned his attention from 
poetry to prose romance. Waverley was not published 
till 1 8 14, and the long series of novels really belong to 
the subsequent chapter. They had, however, long been 
prepared for, and it will be convenient to consider them 
here. Scott had written a fragment of -an historical novel 
(afterwards Waverley) in 1805, and in 1808 he had taken 
up the useful task of preparing for the press an anti- 
quarian story by Strutt, called Queenhoo Hall. His long 
poems of the same decade had necessitated the approach 
to historical study in a romantic and yet human spirit. 



300 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

From his earliest years Scott had been laying up, from 
Scottish and from German sources, impressions which 
were to be definitely useful to him in the creation of his 
great novels. At last, in the maturity of forty-three 
years, he began the gigantic work which he was not 
to abandon until his death in 1832. 

It is difficult to speak of the novels of Sir Walter 
Scott in a perfectly critical spirit. They are a cherished 
part of the heritage of the English-speaking race, and 
in discussing them we cannot bring ourselves to use 
regarding them anything but what to foreign critics 
seems the language of hyperbole. The noble; geniality 
of attitude which they discover in the author, their 
perennial freshness, their variety, their '^magnificent 
train of events," make us impatient of the briefest 
reference to their shortcomings in execution. But it 
is, perhaps, not the highest loyalty to Scott to attempt 
to deny that his great books have patent faults : that 
the conduct of the story in Rob Roy is primitive, that 
the heroines of Ivanhoe are drawn with no psychological 
subtlety, that there is a great deal that is terribly heavy 
and unexhilarating in the pages of Peveril of the Peak. 
It is best, surely, to admit all this, to allow that Scott 
sometimes wrote too rapidly and too loosely, that his 
aniiquarianism sometimes ran away with him, that his 
pictures of mediaeval manners are not always quite con- 
vincing. He has not the inevitable perfection of Jane 
Austen ; he makes- no effort to present himself to us as 
so fine an artist. 

When this is admitted, let the enemy make the best 
they can of it. We may challenge the literatures of the 
world to produce a purer talent, or a writer who has 
with a morj brilli:int and sustained vivacity combined 



SIR WALTER SCOTT 301 

the novel with the romance, the tale of manners with the 
tale of wonder. Scott's early ideal was Fielding, and he 
began the VVaverley series in rivalry with Tom JoncSy but 
he soon left his master. If Scott has not quite the in- 
tense sympathy with humanity nor quite the warm blood 
of Fielding, he has resources which the earlier novehst 
never dreamed of. His design was to please the modern 
world by presenting a tale of the Middle Ages, and to do 
this he had to combat a wide ignorance of and lack of 
sympathy with history ; to create, without a model, 
homely as well as histrionic scenes of ancient life ; to 
enliven and push on the narrative by incessant con- 
trasts, high with low, (r.?gic with facetious, philosophical 
with adventurous. His first idea was, doubtless, to dwell 
as exclusively as poss'ble with Scottish chivalry. But 
Guy Mannering, once severely judged by the very ad- 
mirers of Scott, nov/ esteemed as one of his best books, 
showed what genius for humorous portraiture was pos- 
sessed by the creator of Dandie Dinmont and Dominie 
Sampson ; while the Antiquary ^ in its pictures of seaside 
life in a fishing-town of Scotland, showed how close and 
how vivid was to be his observation of rustic society. 

In all the glorious series there are but two which a 
lover of Scott would wish away. It is needless to men- 
tion them ; their very names recall to us that honourable 
tragedy of over- strain, of excessive imaginative labour, 
which bowed his head at length to the ground. The life 
of Scott, with its splendeurs et uiiseres — the former so hos- 
pitably shared, the latter so heroically borne — forms a 
romance as thrilling as any of his fictions, and one neces- 
sary to our perfect comprehension of his labours. Great 
as had been the vogue of his poems, it was far exceeded by 
that of his novels, and when Scott died his was doubtless 



302 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the strongest naturalistic influence then being exercised 
in Europe. All the romances of Alexandre Dumas and 
Victor Hugo sprang directly from him ; he had inspired 
Fouque in Germany, Manzoni in Italy, and Fernan 
Caballero in Spain. Wherever historical fiction of a 
picturesque and chivalrous order was produced, it bore 
the stamp of Walter Scott upon its margin. Nor with 
the decline of the imitations is it found that the original 
ceases to retain its hold on the interest of the English 
race. 

Walter Scott, so long a European force, has now, 
foiled by the victory of the school of Balzac, retired once 
more to the home he came from, but on British soil there 
is as yet no sign of any diminution of his honour or 
popularity. Continental criticism is bewildered at our 
unshaken loyalty to a writer whose art can be easily 
demonstrated to be obsolete in many of its characteristics. 
But English readers confess the perennial attractiveness 
of a writer whose ^'tone" is the most perfect in our 
national literature, who has left not a phrase which is 
morbid or petulant or base, who is the very type of that 
generous freedom of spirit which we are pleased to 
identify with the character of an English gentleman. 
Into the persistent admiration of Sir Walter Scott there 
enters something of the miUtant imperialism of our race. 



IX 

THE AGE OF BYRON 

i8 15-1840 

It is noticeable that the early manifestations of the 
reforming spirit in English literature had been accom- 
panied by nothing revolutionary in morals or conduct. 
It is true that, at the very outset, Wordsworth, Southey, 
and Coleridge had been incHned to a '^pantisocratic" sym- 
pathy with the principles of the French Revolution, and 
had leaned to the radical side in politics. But the spirit 
of revolt was very mildly awakened in them, and when 
the Reign of Terror came, their aspirations after demo- 
cratic freedom were nipped in the bud. Early in the 
century Wordsworth had become, what he remained, a 
Church and State Tory of the extreme type ; Southey, 
who in 1794 had, '^ shocking to say, wavered between 
deism and atheism," promptly developed a horror for 
every species of liberal speculation, and contributed with 
gusto to the Quarterly Review. Temperament and cir- 
cumstance combined to make Scott a conservative in 
pohtics and manners. Meanwhile, it was in the hands of 
these peaceful men that the literary revolution was pro- 
ceeding, and we look back from 1815 with a sense of 
the extraordinary modesty and wholesome law-abiding 
morality of the generation which introduced romanticism 
in this country. 



304 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

No section of English literature is, we will not say 
more innocent merely, but more void of the appearance 
of offence than that which was produced by the romantic 
reformers of our poetry. The audacity of Wordsworth 
and Coleridge was purely artistic ; it was bounded by 
the determination to destroy certain conventions of style, 
and to introduce new elements and new aspects into the 
treatment of poetry. But these novelties include nothing 
that could unsettle, or even excite, the conscience of the 
least mature of readers. Both these great writers spoke 
much of passion, and insisted on its resumption by an 
art which had permitted it to escape too long. But by 
passion Wordsworth understood no unruly turbulence 
of the senses, no revolt against conventional manners, 
no disturbance of social custom. He conceived the 
term, and illustrated his conception in his poetry, as in- 
tense emotion concentrated upon some object of physical 
or pathetic beauty — such as a mountam, a child, a flower 
— and led directly by it into the channel of imaginative 
expression. He saw that there were aspects of beauty 
which might lead to danger, but from these he and 
Scott, and even Coleridge, resolutely turned away their 
eyes. 

To all the principal writers of this first generation, not 
merely vice, but coarseness and licence were abhorrent, 
as they had been to no earlier race of Englishmen. The 
rudeness of the eighteenth century gave way to a cold 
refinement, exquisitely crystal in its highest expressions, 
a little empty and inhuman in its lower ones. What the 
Continental nations unite to call our ^^ hypocrisy," our 
determination not to face the ugly side of nature at all, 
to deny the very existence of the unseemly instincts, now 
came to the front. In contrast to the European riot, 



BYRON 305 

England held her garments high out of the mire, with a 
somewhat mincing air of excessive virtue. The image 
was created of Britannia, with her long teeth, prudishly 
averting her elderly eyes from the cancan of the nations. 
So far as this refinement was genuine it was a good thing 
—the spotless purity of Wordsworth and Scott is matter 
for national pride — but so far as it was indeed hypo- 
critical, so far as it was an exhibition of empty spiritual 
pride, it was hateful. In any case, the cord was drawn 
so tight that it was bound to snap, and to the generation 
of intensely proper, conservative poets, and novelists there 
succeeded a race of bards who rejoiced to be thought 
profligates, socialists, and atheists. Our hterature was to 
become ^' revolutionary " at last. 

In the Sixth Lord Byron the pent-up animal spirits 
of the new era found the first channel for their violence, 
and England positively revelled in the poetry of crime 
and chaos. The last of a race of lawless and turbulent 
men, proud as Lucifer, beautiful as Apollo, sinister as 
Loki, Byron appeared on the scenes arrayed in every 
quality v/hich could dazzle the youthful and alarm the 
mature. His lovely curly head moved all the women to 
adore him ; his melancholy attitudes were mysteriously 
connected with stories of his appalling wickedness ; his 
rank and ostentation of life, his wild exotic tastes, his 
dehance of restraint, the pathos of his physical infirmity, 
his histrionic gifts as of one, half mountebank, half arch- 
angel, all these combined to give his figure, his whole 
legend, a matchless fascination. Nor, though now so 
much of the gold is turned to tinsel, though nov/ the 
hghts are out upon the stage where Byron strutted, 
can we cease to be fascinated. Even those who most 
strenuously deny him imagination, style, the durable 



306 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

parts of literature, cannot pretend to be unmoved by the 
matchless romance of his career. Goethe declared that 
a man so pre-eminent for character had never existed 
in literature before, and would probably never appear 
again. This should give us the note for a comparative 
estimate of Byron : in quality of style he is most un- 
equal, and is never, perhaps, absolutely first-rate ; but as 
an example of the literary temperament at its boiling- 
point, history records no more brilliant name. 

Byron was in haste to be famous, and wrote before 
he had learned his art. His intention was to resist the 
incursion of the romantic movement, and at the age of 
twenty-one he produced a satire, the aim of which, so 
far as it was not merely splenetic, was the dethronement 
of Wordsworth and Coleridge in favour of Dryden and 
Pope. In taste and conviction he was reactionary to the 
very last; but when he came to write, the verse poured 
forth like lava, and took romantic forms in spite of him. 
His character was formed during the two wild years of 
exile (June 1809 to August 181 1), when, a prey to a 
frenzied restlessness, he scoured the Mediterranean, 
rescued Turkish women, visited Lady Hester Stanhope, 
swam across the Hellespont, rattled at the windows of 
seraglios, and even — so Goethe and the w^orld believed — 
murdered a man with a yataghan and captured an island 
of the Cyclades. Before he began to sing of Lara and 
the Giaour he was himself a Giaour, himself Lara and 
Conrad ; he .had travelled with a disguised Gulnare, he 
had been beloved by Medora, he had stabbed Hassan to 
the heart, and fought by the side of Alp the renegade ; 
or, if he had not done quite all this, people insisted 
that he had, and he was too melancholy to deny the 
impeachment. 



BYRON 307 

Languid as Byron affected to be, and haughtily indo- 
lent, he wrote with extraordinary persistence and rapidity. 
Few poets have composed so much in so short a time. 
The first two cantos of Childe Harold in 181 2 lead off 
the giddy masque of his productions, which for the next 
few years w^ere far too numerous tD be mentioned here 
in detail. Byron's verse romances, somewhat closely 
modelled in form on those of Scott, began with the 
Giaour in 18 13, and each had a beautiful, fatal hero, 
'' of one virtue and a thousand crimes," in whom tens of 
thousands of awe-struck readers believed they recognised 
the poet himself in masquerade. All other poetry in- 
stantly paled before the astounding success of Byron, 
and Scott, who had reigned unquestioned as the popular 
minstrel of the age, '^ gave over WTiting verse-romances " 
and took to prose. Scott's courtesy to his young rival 
was hardly more exquisite than the personal respect 
which Byron showed to one whom he insisted in ad- 
dressing as '^ the Monarch of Parnassus " ; but Scott's 
gentle chieftains were completely driven out of the field 
by the Turkish bandits and pirates. All this time Byron 
was WTiting exceedingly little that has stood the attacks 
of time ; nor, indeed, up to the date of his marriage in 
1 815, can it be said that he had produced anything of 
any real poetical importance. He w^as now, however, 
to be genuinely unhappy and candidly inspired. 

Adversity drove him in upon himself, and gave him 
something of creative sincerity. Perhaps, if he had 
lived, and had found peace with advancing years, he 
might have become a great artist. But that he never 
contrived to be. In 1816 he left England, shaking its 
dust from his feet, no longer a pinchbeck pirate, but 
a genuine outlaw, in open enmity with society. This 



3o8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

enfranchisement acted upon his genius like a tonic^ and 
in the last eight years of his tempestuous and lawless life 
he wrote many things of extraordinary power and even 
splendour. Two sections of his work approach, nearer 
than any others, perfection in their kind. In a species of 
magnificent invective, of which the Vision of Judgment 
(1822) is the finest example, Byron rose to the level of 
Dryden and Swift; in the picturesque satire of social 
life — where he boldly imitated the popular poets of 
Italy, and in particular Casti and Pulci — his extreme 
ease and versatility, his masterly blending of humour 
and pathos, ecstasy and misanthropy, his variegated 
knowledge of men and manners, gave him, as Scott 
observed, something of the universality of Shakespeare. 
Here he is to be studied in Beppo (18 18) and in the un- 
matched Don Juan of his last six years. It is in these 
and the related works that we detect the only perdurable 
Byron, the only poetry that remains entirely worthy of 
the stupendous fame of the author. 

It is the fatal defect of Byron that his verse is rarely 
exquisite. That indescribable combination of harmony 
in form with inevitable propriety in language which 
thrills the reader of Milton, of Wordsworth, of Shelley, 
of Tennyson — this is scarcely to be discerned in Byron. 
We are^ in exchange, presented with a rapid volume of 
rough melody, burning words which are torches rather 
than stars, a line impetuosity, a display of personal tem- 
perament which it has nowadays become more interesting 
to study in the poet than in the poetry, a great noise of 
trumpets and kettle-drums in which the more delicate 
melodies of verse are drowned. The lack of these re- 
finements, however, is imperceptible to all but native 
ears, and the lack of them has not prevented Byron 



BYRON 309 

from seeming to foreign critics to be by far the greatest 
and the most powerful of our poets. There was no diffi- 
culty in comprehending his splendid, rolling rhetoric ; 
and wherever a European nation stood prepared to in- 
veigh against tyranny and conventionality, the spirit of 
Byron was ready to set its young poets ablaze. 

Hence, while in England the influence of Byron on 
poetry was not in the least degree commensurate with 
his fame, and while we have here to look to prose- 
writers, such as Bulwer, as his most direct disciples, his 
verse inspired a whole galaxy of poets on the Continent. 
The revival of Russian and Polish literature dates from 
Byron ; his spirit is felt in the entire attitude and in not 
a few of the accents of Heine and of Leopardi; while 
to the romantic writers of France he seemed the final 
expression of all that was magnificent and intoxicating. 
Neither Lamartine nor Vigny, Victor Hugo nor Musset, 
was independent of Byron's influence, and in the last- 
mentioned we have the most exact reproduction of the 
peculiar Byronic gestures and passionate self-abandon- 
ment which the world has seen. 

In Don Juan Byron had said that ^' poetry is but 
passion." This was a heresy, which it would be easy to 
refute, since by passion he intended little more than a 
relinquishing of the will to the instincts. But it was also 
a prophecy, for it was the reassertion of the right of the 
individual imagination to be a law to itself, and all sub- 
sequent emancipation of the spirit may be traced back 
to the ethical upheaval of which Byron was the storm- 
thrush. He finally broke up the oppressive silence which 
the pure accents of Wordsworth and Coleridge had not 
quite been able to conquer. With Byron the last rags of 
the artificiality which had bound European expression 



3IO MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

for a century and a half were torn off and flung to the 
winds. He taught roughly, melodramatically, inconsist- 
ently, but he taught a lesson of force and vitality. He 
was full of technical faults, drynesses, flatnesses ; he 
licked the power to finish ; he offended by a hundred 
careless impertinences ; but his whole being was an altar 
on w^hich the flame of personal genius flared like a 
conflagration. 

The experiment which Byron made was repeated with 
a more exquisite sincerity by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 
w^ho resembled him in belonging to the aristocratic class, 
and in having a strong instinctive passion for liberty and 
toleration. The younger poet, however, showed still less 
caution than the elder, and while yet a boy gained a 
dangerous reputation for violent radical prejudices and 
anti-social convictions. Partly on this account, and 
partly because the transcendental imagination of Shelley 
was less easy than Byron's piratical romance for common 
minds to appreciate, the poetry of the former was almost 
completely unrecognised until many years after, his death, 
and Byron's deference to Shelley was looked upon as a 
fantastic whim of friendship. The younger poet was 
erratic at Eton and Oxford, being expelled from the latter 
for a puerile outburst of atheism. Born in 1792, the 
productions of Shelley were already numerous when, in 
his Alastor (1816), he first showed any definite disposition 
for the higher parts of poetry. This majestic study in 
blank verse was superior in melody and in imaginative 
beauty to anything that had been written in English, 
other than by Wordsworth and Coleridge in their youth, 
since the romantic age began^ The scholarship of j\Iilton 
and Wordsworth was obvious, but Alastor contains pas- 
sages descriptive of the transport of the soul in the 



SHELLEY 311 

presence of natural loveliness in which a return to the 
Hellenic genius for style is revealed. 

Shelley lived only six years longer, but these were 
years of feverish composition, sustained, in spite of 
almost complete want of public sympathy, at a fiery 
height of intensity. He left England, and in that exile 
was brought immediately into contact with Byron, with 
whom he formed an intimacy which no eccentricity on 
either side sufficed to dissolve. That he was serviceable 
to Byron no one will deny ; that Byron depressed him 
he did not attempt to conceal from himself ; yet the 
esteem of the more popular poet was valuable to the 
greater one. The terror caused by the vague rumour of 
Shelley's rebellious convictions was not allayed by the 
publication of Laon and CytJina (1817), a wild narrative of 
an enthusiastic brother and sister, martyrs to liberty. In 
1818 was composed, but not printed, the singularly perfect 
realistic poem of Julian and Maddalo. Shelley was now 
saturating himself with the finest Greek and Italian classic 
verse — weaving out of his thoughts and intellectual ex- 
periences a pure and noble system of aesthetics. This 
he illustrated in 1820 by his majestic, if diffuse and some- 
times overstrained lyrical drama of Prometheus Unbound^ 
with which he pubHshed a few independent lyrics which 
scarcely have their peer in the literature of the world ; 
among these the matchless Ode to the West Wind must 
be named. The same year saw the publication of the 
Cenciy the most dramatic poetic play written in English 
since the tragedy of Venice Preserved. Even here, 
where Shelley might expect to achieve popularity, some- 
thing odious in the essence of the plot warned off the 
public. 

He continued to publish, but without an audience; nor 



312 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

did his EpipsychidioUy a melodious rhapsody of Platonic 
love, nor his AdonaiSj an elegy of high dignity and splen- 
dour, in the manner of Bion and in commemoration of 
Keats, nor the crystalline lyrics with which he eked out 
his exiguous publications, attract the slightest interest. 
Shelley was, more than any other English poet has been, 
le ban?ii de Hesse. Then, quite unexpectedly, on the 8th 
of July 1822 he was drowned while yachting in the Gulf 
of Spezia. He left behind him unrevised, amid a world 
of exquisite fragments, a noble but vague gnomic poem, 
the Trdiimph of Life, in which Petrarch's Trionfi are 
summed up and sometiJhes excelled. 

A life of disappointment and a death in obscurity were 
gradually followed by the growth of an almost exag- 
gerated reputation. Fifty years after his death Shelley 
had outshone all his contemporaries — nay, with the ex- 
ception of Shakespeare, was probably the most passion- 
ately admired of all the English poets. If this extremity 
of fame has once more slightly receded, if Shelley holds 
his place among the sovereign minstrels of England, but 
rather abreast of than in front of them, it is because time 
lias reduced certain of his violent paradoxes to common- 
places, and because the world, after giving several of his 
axioms of conduct full and respectful consideration, has 
determined to refrain from adopting them. Shelley, when 
he was not inspired and an artist, was a prophet vaguely 
didactic or neurotically prejudiced ; his is the highest ideal 
of poetic art produced by the violence of the French 
Revolution, but we are too constantly reminded of that 
moral parentage, and his sans-culottism is no longer ex- 
hilarating, it is merely tiresome. There are elements, 
then, even in Shelley, which have to be pared away \ 
but, when these are removed, the remainder is beautiful 



SHELLEY 3 1 3 

beyond the range of praise — perfect in aerial, choral 
melody, perfect in the splendour and purity of its 
imagery, perfect in the divine sweetness and magnetic 
tenderness of its sentiment. He is probably the English 
writer who has achieved the highest successes in pure 
lyric, whether of an elaborate and antiphonal order, or 
of that which springs in a stream of soaring music 
straight from the heart. 

Closely allied as he was with Byron in several respects, 
both of temperament and circumstance, it is fortunate 
that Shelley was so very little affected by the predomi- 
nance of his vehement rival. His intellectual ardour 
threw out, not puffs of smoke, as Byron's did, but a 
white vapour. He is not always transparent, but always 
translucent, and his mind moves ethereally among in- 
corporeal images and pantheistic attributes, dimly at 
times, yet always clothed about with radiant purity. Of 
the gross Georgian mire not a particle stuck to the robes 
of Shelley. His diction is curiously compounded of 
forcible, fresh mintages, mingled with the verbiage of 
the lyric poets of the eighteenth century, so that at his 
best he seems like ^Eschylus, and at his worst merely 
like Akenside. For all his excessive attachment to revo- 
lutionary ideas, Shelley retains much more of the age 
of Gray than either Keats, Coleridge, or Wordsworth ; 
his style, carefully considered, is seen to rest on a basis 
built about 1760, from which it is every moment spring- 
ing and sparkling like a fountain in columns of ebullient 
lyricism. But sweep away from Shelley whatever gives 
us exquisite pleasure, and the residuum will be found 
to belong to the eighteenth century. Hence, paradoxical 
as it sounds, the attitude of Shelley to style was in the 
main retrograde ; he was, for instance, no admirer of 



314 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the arabesques of the Cockney school. He was, above 
all else, a singer, and in the direction of song he rises at 
his best above all other English, perhaps above all other 
modern European poets. There is an ecstasy in his best 
lyrics and odes that claps its wings and soars until it is 
lost in the empyrean of transcendental melody. This 
rhapsodical charm is entirely inimitable ; and in point of 
fact Shelley, passionately admired, has been very little 
followed, and with success, perhaps, only by Mr. Svdn- 
burne. His genius lay outside the general trend of our 
poetical evolution ; he is exotic and unique, and such 
influence as he has had, apart from the effect on the 
pulse of the individual of the rutilant beauty of his 
strophes, has not been very advantageous. He is often 
hectic, and sometimes hysterical, and, to use his own 
smgular image, those who seek for mutton-chops will 
discover that Shelley keeps a gin-palace. 

A third influence at work in this second romantic 
generation was that consciously formed on Elizabethan 
and Italian lines. . The group of poets which culminated 
in Keats desired to forget all that had been written in 
English verse since about 1625, and to continue the 
work of such Italianated poets as FletcPier and the 
disciples of Spenser. There can be no question that 
a very prominent part in heralding this revival was taken 
by Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets 
(1808), a book which seemed to be unnoticed at first, but 
which was devoured with ecstasy by several young men 
of good promise, and particularly by Hunt, Keats, 
Procter, and Beddoes. While Leigh Hunt was being 
imprisoned for libelling the Prince Regent, in 1812, he 
made a very minute study of the Parnaso ItalianOy and 
particularly of Ariosto. Between 1814 and 1818 he 



KEATS 315 

published several volumes, in which the Italians were 
closely and fervidly imitated ; among these the Story of 
Rimini holds a really important place in the evolution of 
Enghsh poetry. Hunt was very promptly imitated by 
Keats, who was eleven years his junior, and in every 
element of genius immeasurably his superior. A certain 
school of critics has never been able to forgive Leigh 
Hunt, who, it must be admitted, lacked distinction in his 
writings, and taste in his personal relations ; but Hunt 
was liberal and genial, and a genuine devotee of poetry. 

Of the other writers who formed what was rudely called 
the Cockney school, under the presidency of Hunt, ]. H. 
Reynolds and Charles Wells had talent, but John Keats 
was one of the greatest poets that any country has pro- 
duced. The compositions which place the name of this 
stable-keeper's son with those of Shakespeare and Milton 
were written between 1817, when he first ceased to be 
stiff and affected, and 1820, when the failure of his 
health silenced his wonderful voice. Within this brief 
space of time he contrived to enrich English literature 
with several of the most perennially attractive narrative- 
poems in the language, not mere snatches of lyrical song, 
but pieces requiring sustained effort and a careful con- 
structive scheme, Endymion, Lamia, the Eve of St, AgneSy 
the Pot of Basil, Hyperion, When he wrote his latest 
copy of verses, Keats had not completed twenty-five 
years of life, and it is the copious perfection of work 
accomplished so early, and under so many disadvantages, 
which is the wonder of biographers. He died unap- 
preciated, not having persuaded Byron, Scott, or Words- 
worth of his value, and being still further than Shelley 
was from attracting any public curiosity or admiration. 
His triumph was to be posthumous ; it began with the 



3i6 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

magnanimous tribute of Adonais, and it has gone on 
developing and extending, until, at the present moment, 
it is Keats, the semi-educated surgeon's apprentice, cut 
down in his crude youth, who obtains the most suffrages 
among all the great poets of the opening quarter of the 
century. To a career which started with so steady a 
splendour, no successes should have been denied. It is 
poor work to speculate about might-have-beens, but the 
probable attainments of Keats, if he could have lived, 
amount, as nearly as such unfulfilled prophecies can ever 
do, to certainty. Byron might have become a sovereign, 
and Shelley would probably have descended into politics ; 
Keats must have gone on to further and further culmina- 
tion of poetic art. 

Nothing in English poetry is more lovely than those 
passages in which Keats throws off his cockney excesses 
and sings in the note of classic purity. At these moments, 
and they were growing more and more frequent till he 
ceased to write, he attains a depth of rich, voluptuous 
melody, by the side of w^iich Byron ssems thin, and 
even Shelley shrill. If we define what poetry is in its 
fullest and deepest expression, we find ourselves describ- 
ing the finest stanzas in the maturer works of Keats. His 
great odes, in which, perhaps, he is seen to the most 
advantage as an artist in verse, are Titanic and Titianic — 
their strength is equalled only by the glow and depth 
of their tone. From Spenser, from Shakespeare, from 
Milton, from Ariosto, he freely borrowed beauties of 
style, which he fused into an enamel or amalgam, no 
longer resembling the sources from w^hich they were 
stolen, but wearing the impress of the god-like thief 
himself. It is probable that, marvellous as is such a 
fragment as Hyperion, it but faintly foreshadows the 



KEATS 317 

majesty of the style of which Keats would shortly have 
been master. Yet, enormous as are the disadvantages 
under which the existing work of Keats labours, w^e are 
scarcely conscious of them. We hold enough to prove 
to us how predominant the imagination was in him, how 
sympathetic his touch as an artist. He loved '^ the prin- 
ciple of beauty in all things," and he had already, in 
extreme youth, secured enough of the rich felicity of 
phrase and imperial illumination, which marks the 
maturity of great poets, to hold his own with the best. 
No one has lived who has known better than he how 
to ^Moad every rift of his subject W'ith ore." 

It is impossible, too, not to recognise that Keats has 
been the master-spirit in the evolution of Victorian 
poetry. Both Tennyson and Browning, having in child- 
hood been enchained by Byron, and then in adolescence 
by Shelley, reaC;hed manhood only to transfer their alle- 
giance to Keats, whose influence on English poetry since 
1830 has been not less universal than that of Byron on 
the literature of the Continent. His felicities are exactly 
of a kind to stimulate a youthful poet to emulation, and 
in spite of what he owes to the Italians — to whom he 
went precisely as Chaucer did, to gain richness of poeti- 
cal texture — the speech of Keats is full of a true British 
raciness. No poet, save Shakespeare himself, is more 
English than Keats ; none presents to us in the harmiony 
of his verse, his personal character, his letters and his 
general tradition, a figure more completely attractive, 
nor better calculated to fire the dreams of a generous 
successor. 

The friend and biographer of Byron, Thomas Moore, 
was in sympathy with the poets of- revolution, and was 
long associated with them in popular estimation. Ai 



3i8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

the present moment Moore is extremely disdained by 
the critics, and has the greatest possible difficulty in 
obtaining a fair hearing. He is scarcely mentioned, 
save to be decried and ridiculed. This is a reaction 
against the reputation which Moore long continued 
to enjoy on rather slight grounds, but it is excessive. 
As a lyrical satirist, his lightness of touch and buoyant 
wit give an Horatian flavour to those collections of 
epistles and fables of which the Fudge Family in Paris 
(1818) began a series. But the little giddy bard had a 
serious side ; he was profoundly incensed at the un- 
sympathetic treatment of his native island by England, 
and he seized the 'Mear harp of his country" in an 
amiable frenzy of Hibernian sentiment. The result was 
a huge body of songs and ballads, the bulk of which are 
now, indeed, worthless, but out of which a careful hand 
can select eight or ten that defy the action of tim.e, and 
preserve their wild, undulating melancholy, their sound 
as of bells dying away in the distance. The artificial 
prettiness and smoothness of Moore are seen to perfec- 
tion in his chain of Oriental romances, Lalla Rookh 
(1817), and these, it is to be feared, are tarnished beyond 
all recovery. 

The five years from 1816 to 182 1 were the culmi- 
nating years of the romantic movement. The spirit of 
poetry invaded every department of English ; there 
were birds in every bush, and wild music burdened 
every bough. In particular, several writers of an older 
school, whom the early movement of Wordsworth and 
Coleridge had silenced, felt themselves irresistibly moved 
to sing once more, and swell the new choir with their 
old voices ; it was eras arnet qui nu7iquain ainavit, quiqne 
amavit eras amet. Among those who had loved more 



CRABBE 319 

than twenty years before was Samuel Rogers, who came 
forward with -ix Jacqueline bound up with Byron's Lara — 
strange incongruity, a Methody spinster on the arm of a 
dashing dragoon. Save on this solitary occasion, how- 
ever, the amiable Muse of Rogers never forgot what was 
due to her self-respect, and clung close to the manner 
of Goldsmith, slowly and faintly relaxing the rigour of 
versification in a blank verse Italy y but never, in a single 
graceful Hne, quite reaching the point of poetry. The 
other revenant, George Crabbe, did better. After a 
silence almost unbroken for two-and-twenty years, he 
resumed his sturdy rhyming in 1807, and in 18 10 en- 
riched the language w-ith a poem of really solid merit, 
the BoroiLgJij a picture of social and physical conditions in 
a seaside town on the Eastern Coast. Crabbe never ex- 
celled, perhaps never equalled, this saturnine study of the 
miseries of provincial life ; like his own watchman, the 
poet seems to have no other design than to 'Met in truth, 
terror, and the day." Crabbe was essentially a writer of 
the eighteenth century, bound close by the versification 
of Churchill and those who, looking past Pope, tried to 
revive the vehement music of Dryden ; his attitude to 
hfe and experience, too, was of the age of 1780. Yet he 
showed the influence of romanticism and of his contem- 
poraries in the exactitude of his natural observation and 
his Dutch niceness in the choice of nouns. He avoided, 
almost as carefully as Wordsworth himself, the vague 
sonorous synonym which continues the sound while 
adding nothing to the sense. As Tennyson used to say, 
'^ Crabbe has a world of his own," and his plain, strong, 
unaffected poetry will always retain a certain number of 
admirers. 

This second generation of romanticism was marked 



320 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

by a development of critical writing which was of the 
very highest importance. It may indeed be said, without 
much exaggeration, that at this time literary criticism, in 
the modern sense, was first seriously exercised in Eng- 
land. In other words, the old pseudo-classic philosophy 
of literature, founded on the misinterpretation of Aristotle, 
was completely obsolete ; while the rude, positive expres- 
sion of baseless opinion with which the Edinbui^gh and 
the Quarterly had started, had broken down, leaving room 
for a new sensitive criticism founded on comparison with 
ancient and exotic types of style, a sympathetic study of 
nature, and a genuine desire to appreciate the writer's 
contribution on its own merits. Of this new and fertile 
school of critics, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and 
Lamb were the leaders. 

It is noticeable that the utterances of these writers 
which have made their names famous were, as a rule, 
written on occasion, and in consequence of an oppor- 
tunity which came seldom and as a rule came late. 
Hunt's best work in criticism dates from 1808 until 
1840 indeed, but only because during those years he 
possessed or influenced successive journals in which 
he was free to speak his mind. Hazlitt, on the other 
hand, was thirty-five years of age before his intro- 
duction to the Edinburgh Review enabled him in 1814 
to begin his articles on the English comic writers. 
To the accident that Hazlitt was invited to lecture at 
the Surrey Institution we owe his English Poets and 
his essays on Elizabethan literature. Lamb and De 
Quincey found little vehicle for their ideas until the 
periodical called London was issued in 1820 ; here the 
Essays of Elia and the Opiuni-Eater were published, and 
here lesser writers, and later Carlyle himself with his Life 



CHARLES LAMB 321 

and Wrilings of Schiller, found a sympathetic asylum. 
It was therefore to the development and the increased 
refinement of periodical literature that the new criticism 
was most indebted, and newspapers of a comparatively 
humble order, without wealth or influence behind them, 
did that for literature which the great Quarterly Reviews, 
with their insolence and their sciolism, had conspicuously 
failed to achieve. 

With the definite analysis of literary productions we 
combine here, as being closely allied to it, the criticism 
of life contributed by all these essayists, but pre-eminently 
by Charles Lamb. This, perhaps the most beloved of 
English authors, with all his sufferings bravely borne, his 
long-drawn sorrows made light of in a fantastic jest, 
was the associate of the Lake poets at the outset of their 
career. He accepted their principles although he w^holly 
lacked their exaltation in the presence of nature, and was 
essentially an urban, not a rural talent, though the tale of 
Rosamund Gray may seem to belie the judgment. The 
poetry of his youth was not very successful, and in the 
first decade of the century Lamb sank to contributing 
facetious ana to the newspapers at sixpence a joke. His 
delicate Tales from Shakespeare (1807), and the Specimens 
of 1808, of which we have already spoken, kept his 
memory before the minds of his friends, and helped to 
bring in a new era of thought by influencing a few young 
minds. Meanwhile he was sending to certain fortunate 
correspondents those divine epistles which, since their 
publication in 1837, have placed Lamb in the front rank 
of English letter-writers. But still he Vv'as unknown, 
and remained so u-ntil in 1818 the young publisher Oilier 
was persuaded to venture on a collection of Lamb's 
scattered writings. At last, at the age of forty-five, he 



32 2 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

began to immortalise himself with those Essays of Elm, 
of which the opening series was ultimately given to the 
world as a volume in 1823. 

The career of Thomas de Quince y began even later, 
and was even more obscure. Ten years younger than 
Lamb, and like him an admirer and disciple of Words- 
worth and Coleridge, De Quincey made no serious attempt 
to excel in verse, and started in prose not earlier than, 
as has been already noted, 1821, the book of the Opium- 
Eater appearing anonymously the following year. He 
had now put out from shore, and we find him for the 
future, practically until his death in 1859, swimming '4n 
the midst of a German Ocean of literature," and rarely 
consenting to quit the pen. His collected works, with 
difficulty saved, just before his end, out of a chaos of 
anonymity, first revealed to the general public the quality 
of this astonishing author. In the same way, to chron- 
icle what Wilson contributed to literature is mainly to 
hunt for Nodes Ambrosiance in the file of Blackwood' s 
Magazine, To each of these critical writers, diverse 
in taste and character, yet all the children of the new 
romantic movement, the advance of the higher jour- 
nalism was the accident which brought that to the 
surface which might otherwise have died in them un- 
fertilised and unperceived. 

Of this group of writers, two are now found to be 
predominant — Lamb for the humour and humanity of 
his substance, De Quincey for the extraordinary oppor- 
tunity given by his form for the discussion of the 
elements of style. Of the latter writer it has been 
said that ^^ he languished with a sort of despairing 
nympholepsy after intellectual pleasures." His manner 
of writing was at once extremely splendid and extremely 



1 



DE QUINCEY 323 

precise. He added to literature several branches or pro- 
vinces which had up to his day scarcely been cultivated 
in English ; among these, impassioned autobiography, 
distinguished by an exquisite minuteness in the analysis 
of recollected sensations, is pre-eminent. He revelled 
in presenting impressions of intellectual self-conscious- 
ness in phrases of what he might have called sequacious 
splendour. De Quincey was but little enamoured of 
the naked truth, and a suspicion of the fabulous hangs, 
like a mist, over all his narrations. The most elaborate 
of them, the Revolt of the Tartars ^ a large canvas covered 
with groups of hurrying figures in sustained and painful 
flight, is now understood to be pure romance. The first 
example of his direct criticism is Whiggisni m its Relations 
to Literature, which might be called the Anatomy of a 
Pedant. 

De Quincey is sometimes noisy and flatulent, some- 
times trivial, sometimes unpardonably discursive. But 
when he is at his best, the rapidity of his mind, its 
lucidity, its humour and good sense, the writer's pas- 
sionate loyalty to letters, and his organ-melody of style 
command our deep respect. He does not, like the 
majority of his critical colleagues, approach literature 
for purposes of research, but to obtain moral effects. 
De Quincey, a dreamer of beautiful dreams, disdained 
an obstinate vassalage to mere matters of fact, but sought 
with intense concentration of effort after a conscientious 
and profound psychology of letters. 

With this group of literary critics may be mentioned 
one who was not without relation with them, and who 
was yet widely distinct. The men of whom we have 
been speaking sought their inspiration mainly in the 
newly recovered treasures of early national poetry and 



324 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

prose. These were also formative elements in the mind 
of Walter Savage Landor ; but he imitated more 
closely than they the great classics of antiquity, and, 
in particular, Pindar, ^schylus, and Cicero. As early 
as 1795 he had occasionally published poetry ; his con- 
centrated and majestic Gebir (1798) is certainly one of 
the pioneers of English romanticism. But Landor, with 
his tumultuous passions and angry self-sufficiency, led 
a youth tormented by too much emotional and social 
tempest and too little public encouragement to become 
prominent in prose or verse. It was in the comparative 
serenity of middle age, and during his happy stay in or 
near Florence from 1821 to 1828, that he wrote the 
Imaginary Conversations, and became one of the great 
Enghsh men of letters. No other work of Landor's has 
achieved popularity, although m^uch of his occasional 
prose and verse has called forth the impassioned praise 
of individuals. 

The Conversations display, in stiff and Attic form, 
dramatic aptitudes, for confirmation of which we search 
in vain the pages of his academic plays. These his- 
toric dialogues, strange as it seems, were refused by 
publisher after publisher ; but, at length, in 1824, two 
volumes of them were issued, and the world was gained. 
This great series of stately colloquies holds a unique 
position in English literature. The style of Landor is 
too austere, too little provided with ornament, too strenu- 
ously allusive to please the running reader. But in a 
mingling of dignity and delicacy, purity and vehemence, 
into what is an amalgam of all the rarer qualities of 
thought and expression, Landor ranks only just below 
the greatest masters of language. His genius is impeded 
by a certain haughty stiffness ; he approaches majestic- 



HALLAM 325 

ally, and sometimes nimbly, but always protected from 
the reader by a suit of mail, always rendered inacces- 
sible by an unconquerable shyness. 

The second romantic generation was marked by the 
rise of a school of historians inferior only to the great 
classic group of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. In the 
full tide of monarchical reaction, William Mitford com- 
pleted, in 18 10, his History of Greece y a book eloquent 
and meritorious in its way, but to be superseded by the 
labours of Grote. Sharon Turner, a careful imitator 
of Gibbon, illustrated the Anglo-Saxon period of our 
chronicles, and the Scottish metaphysician. Sir James 
Mackintosh, towards the close of his life, occupied 
himself with the constitutional history of England. Of 
more importance was the broad and competent English 
history of Lingard, a Catholic priest at Ushaw, whose 
work, though bitterly attacked from the partisan point 
of view, has been proved to be in the main loyal and 
accurate. These excellent volumes appeared in 181 9, 
and deserve the praise which should be given in rheto- 
rical times to histories of modest learning and research. 
It was the ambition of Southey, who was an admirable 
biographer, to excel in history also. In Brazil and in 
the Peninsular war he found excellent subjects, but his 
treatment was not brilliant enough to save his books 
from becoming obsolete. The second of these was, 
indeed, almost immediately superseded by Sir W. 
Napier's History of the War in the Peninsula (1828), a 
masterpiece of military erudition. 

These namxcs, however, merely lead us up to that of 
Henry Hallam, whose View of the Middle Ages^ in 
1818, announced to the world a brilliantly gifted writer 
on politic:il history. His Constitutional Hisioiy of 



326 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

England came nine years later. In his old age 
Hallam made a track through the previously path- 
less waste of general European literature. His gravity 
is supported by a vast basis of solid knowledge, 
his judgment is sane and balanced, and to his im- 
mediate contemporaries his style appeared remarkable 
for ^'succinctness and perspicuous beauty." But the 
modern writer is not so well pleased with Hallam, who 
begins to be the Georgian type of the falsely impressive. 
His felicities are those which Macaulay emphasised and 
carried to a farther precision ; his faults are his own, 
and they are a want of intuitive sympathy with the 
subject under discussion, and a monotonous and barren 
pomp of delivery which never becomes easy or flexible. 
The far-famed '^ judgment," too, of Hallam is not as 
wide as we could wish. He is safe only in the dis- 
cussion of recognised types, and the reader searches 
his critical pages in vain for signs of the recognition of 
an eccentric or abnormal talent. The most laudable 
tendency of the historians of this age, seen in Hallam, 
indeed, but even more plainly in secondary writers, such 
as P. F. Tytler, Coxe, and James Mill, was towards the 
adoption of a scientific accuracy. It was the aim of 
these men to reject mere legend and rhetorical super- 
stition, and to build, as one of them said, ^^ the history 
of a country upon unquestionable muniments." In this 
way they pointed directly to that scientific school of 
history which has been one of the glories of the later 
years of the nineteenth century. 

The splendid achievements of Miss Austen in the novel 
and Sir Walter Scott in romance tended somewhat to 
the discouragement of their immediate successors. The 
Waverley Novels continued to be poured forth, in rapid 



NOVELISTS 327 

and splendid succession, throughout the years which we 
are now considering, and they obscured the fame of all 
possible rivals. Yet there were, during this period, 
secondary wTiters, independent of the influence of 
Scott; whose novels possessed sterling merit. From 
that interesting Scottish author, Mary Brunton, w^hose 
Self-Control (181 1) and Discipline (1814) are excellent 
precursors of a long series of '^kail-yard" fiction, there 
naturally descended the delightful Miss Ferrier, w'hose 
Marriage (18 18) charmed not only the author of Waverleyy 
but a host of lesser readers, by its lively humour and its 
delicious satire of many types of Scotch womanhood. 
Miss Ferrier would be a Doric Jane Austen, were her skill 
in the evolution of a plot a little better trained, and her 
delineation of character a little more sternly restrained 
from caricature. The story of her delicate tact in sooth- 
ing the shattered faculties of Sir Walter Scott has 
endeared Miss Ferrier to thousands who never read her 
three amusing novels. J. G. Lockhart, though Scott's 
son-in-law, was not his disciple in four novels of a 
modern and more or less psychological class. Adam 
Blair (1822) is the best of these, and escapes the frigidity 
of the author's one classical romance, Valerius (1821), a 
highly accomplished attempt to resuscitate domestic 
society under Trajan. 

Romance was continued on somewhat the same lines 
w^hich had made Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis so popular. 
The grisly story of Melmoth the Wanderery by Maturin, 
with its horrible commerce with demons, and its scenes of 
bombastic passion, dates from 1820. Mrs. Percy Shelley, 
as befitted the widow of so great a magician of language, 
reached a purer style and a more impressive imagination 
in her ghastly romance of Frankensteiiiy which has given 



328 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

an image (usually misquoted) to everyday English 
speech, and may still be read with genuine terror and 
pity. A very spirited and yet gloomy novel, the Ana- 
statius of Hope (1819) appeared at a time when the 
public were ablaze with the pretensions of Byron ; the 
hero of this daring, piratical romance is all that the noble 
poet desired himself to be supposed to be. James Morier 
opened a series of tales of Oriental manners by the 
publication of Hajji Baba in 1824 ; the satire of Persian 
manners was brilliant enough and keen enough to call 
forth a remonstrance against this ^'very fooHsh business" 
from the Shah himself. Morier was anxious to turn the 
enormous success of this his first book to account, but 
in further publications he was less successful. He tried 
to be serious, while his genius led him to the laughable. 

Native talent and a hopeless absence of taste and 
judgment were never more strangely mingled than in 
John Gait, v/ho, after vainly essaying every department 
of letters, published in middle life an admirable comic 
novel, the Annals of the Parish{i^2i)y and set all Scotland 
laughing. It is the autobiography of a country minister, 
and describes the development of society in a thriving 
lowland village with inimitable humour and whimsicality. 
Gait went on pouring forth novels almost until his death 
in 1839, but he never hit the target again so plainly in 
the bull's eye. 

Byron was scarcely dead before his influence began 
to display itself in the work of a multitude of writers 
of ^' fashionable " novels, dealing mainly with criminals 
of high birth, into the desperate texture of whose lives 
there was woven a thread of the ideal. In this school 
of fiction two young men rose to the highest distinction, 
and ^^ thrilled the boys with dandy pathos" in a lavish 



LYTTON 329 

profusion. Of these elegant and fluent novelists the 
younger made his appearance first, with Vivian Grayy 
in 1826, but his rival was close behind him with Falkland 
in 1827 and Pelham in 1828. Through the next twenty 
years they raced neck by neck for the suffrages of the 
polite. In that day Edward Lytton Bulwer, after- 
wards the first Lord Lytton, seemed a genius of the 
very highest order, but it was early perceived that his 
dandiacal attitude was not perfectly sincere, that the 
graces of his style were too laboured and prolix, and 
that the tone of his novels fostered national conceit and 
prejudice at the expense of truth. His sentiment was 
mawkish, his creations were unsubstantial and often pre- 
posterous. But the public liked the fastidious elaborate- 
ness of a gentleman who catered for their pleasures 
*'with his fingers covered with dazzling rings, and his 
feet delightfully pinched in a pair of looking - glass 
boots" ; and Bulwer Lytton certainly possessed extra- 
ordinary gifts of activity, versatility, and sensitiveness 
to the requirements of his readers. What has shattered 
the once-glittering dome of his reputation is what early 
readers of Zanoni called his ^' fearfully beautiful word- 
painting," his hollow rhetoric, his puerile horrors. To- 
wards the end of his glorious career Lord Lytton 
contrived to prune his literary extravagances, and his 
Litest works are his best. 

To early contemporaries the novels of Benjamin 
Disraeli, long afterwards Earl of Beaconsfield, 
seemed more extravagant and whimsical than even 
those of Bulwer. Disraeli, too, belonged to the great 
company of the dandies — to the Brummels and Lauzuns 
of literature. His early novels were'baffling miscellanies 
of the wildest and the most foppish folly combined with 



330 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

rare political wit and a singular clairvoyance. A like 
inconsistency marked their style, which is now almost 
crazy in its incoherence, and now of a florid but re- 
strained beauty to which Bulwer, with all his machinery 
of rhetoric, never attained. Contarini Fleming (1832) 
may be said to record a step towards the emancipation 
of English romance, in its extraordinary buoyancy of 
Byronic stimulus. But as a writer, Disraeli was at his 
best and steadily improving from Venetia (1837) to 
lancred (1847). In these novels he is less tawdry in his 
ornament, less glittering in his affectation of Voltairean 
epigram, less inflated and impracticable than in his 
earlier, and certainly than in his two latest novels, 
those curious fruits of his old age. The dandy style, 
of which Barbey d'Aurevilly was the contemporary type 
in France, is best studied in England in Disraeli, whose 
novels, though they no longer appeal to the masses, 
preserve better than Bulwer's the attention of cultivated 
readers. In these Byronic novelists, who preserved for 
their heroes ''the dear corsair expression, half savage, 
half soft," love of the romance of pure adventure was 
handed down, across Dickens and Thackeray, and in 
an indirect way Bulwer and Disraeli are the progenitors 
of the Ouidas and Rider Haggards of a later age. 

A very peculiar talent — in its fantastic nature, perhaps, 
more delicate and original than any of these — was that of 
Thomas Love Peacock, the learned friend and corre- 
spondent of Shelley. This interesting satirist displayed 
a survival of the eighteenth-century temper in nine- 
teenth-century forms, and thought of Voltaire when 
the rest of the world was thinking of Scott, whom 
Peacock considered ''amusing only because he misre- 
presented everything." The new was singularly odious 



PEACOCK 331 

to him ; it was only in the old, the classical, the Attic, 
that he could take any pleasure. The poetry of Peacock, 
both serious and ludicrous, has a charm of extreme 
elegance ; but the qualities of his distinguished mind 
are best observed in his curious satirical or grotesque 
romances, seven in number, of which Headlong Hall 
(1816) was the first, and Nio;htmare Abbey {\%\%) doubtless 
the most entertaining. His latest novel, Gryll Grangey 
appeared so late as i860, and Peacock outlived all his 
contemporaries, dying at a great age in 1862. He totally 
disregarded English traditions of romance-writing, and 
followed the eighteenth-century type of French conte. 
In his eccentric, discursive way, he is the wittiest English 
writer of the age, and after almost passing into oblivion, 
he is once more becoming a prominent favourite with 
readers of fastidious taste. 

The fourth decade of this century was, on the whole, 
a period of rest and exhaustion in the literature of this 
country. In poetry it was marked by the disappearance 
into silence of those who had done most to make the 
age what it was, a time of progress and revolt. The 
younger poets were dead, their elder brethren were 
beginning to pass away, and those who survived the 
longest, in particular Wordsworth and Landor, con- 
tinued to add to the bulk, but not signally to the value 
of their works. Yet Tennyson, little observed or praised, 
was now producing the most exquisite and the most 
brilhantly varied of his lyrics. Discouraged at his recep- 
tion, he had published, when this chapter closes, nothing 
since 1833. The solitary young poet who deserved to be 
mentioned in the same breath, Elizabeth Barrett, was 
famous before 1840, but not for those pieces of w^hich 
her riper taste chiefly approved, or those for which 



332- MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

posterity is still admiring her after sixty years. In this lull 
of the poetic world the voice of Robert Browning was 
.yet unheard, though it had spoken out in Paracelsus and 
Strafford. But the sportive fancy of Hood, already near- 
ing the close of his brief life, was highly appreciated, 
and Praed, though still uncollected, had left a splendid 
memory to his friends. Where poets were so few, the 
pure talent of Hartley Coleridge, the greater S. T. Cole- 
ridge's eldest, unhappy son, may claim a word. A group 
of dramatists and lyrical writers', among whom Beddoes 
is by far the greatest, link the generation of Keats and 
Shelley with that of Tennyson and the Browaiings ; but 
most of them are nebulous, and the most eminent mere 
asteroids in comparison with the planets which preceded 
and followed them. 

In prose more vigorous influences were at work. In 
1825 Macaulay marked an epoch in criticism by contri- 
buting to the Edinburgh Review his elaborate article on 
Milton, the earliest example in English of the modern 
etudcy or monograph in miniature, which has since 
become so popular a province of letters. When our 
period closes, Macaulay is a Cabinet minister. His 
career as an essayist was mainly prior to 1840, at which 
date he had shown himself neither ballad-writer nor 
historian. In his famous reviews he created a species 
of literature, partly biographical, partly critical, which 
had an unrivalled effect in raising the average of cul- 
tivation. Countless readers found in the pages of 
Macaulay's Essays their earliest stimulus to independent 
thought and the humane study of letters. Carlyle, live 
years the senior of Macaulay, had been much slower in 
reaching the great mass of the public. His graceful 
Life of SchUlcr {\Zz^f) hiiving failed to achieve a world- 



CARLYLE 333 

wide sensation, Carlyle deliberately and most success- 
fully set himself to insist upon attention by adopting a 
style of extreme eccentricity, full of Germanisms, vio- 
lently abrupt and tortuously parenthetical, a lingo which 
had to be learned like a foreign language. In the recep- 
tion ultimately given to Sartor Resartus (1834) ^^ ^"^^ 
assured of the success of his stratagem, and he continued, 
to his eminent personal advantage, to write, not in Eng- 
lish, but in Carlylese for the remainder of his life. 

The names crowd upon us as we endeavour to dis- 
tinguish what literature was when Queen Victoria 
ascended the throne. Marryat was at the cHmax of 
his rapidly won nautical fame ; the cavaliers of G. P. R. 
James were riding down innumerable lonely roads ; the 
first Lord Lytton was in the midst of the series of his 
elaborately heroical romances, not cast in gold, perhaps, 
but richly parcel-gilt ; Disraeli had just cuhninated in 
Henrietta Temple, Such were the forces which up to 
1840 were the most active in purely popular literature. 
None of them, perhaps, was of the highest order either 
in imagination or in style, but each in his own way was 
repeating and emphasising the lesson of the romantic 
revolution of 1798. 



X 

THE EARLY VICTORIAN AGE 

1840-1870 

In spite of the interesting elements which we have just 
endeavoured to indicate^ the history of EngHsh hterature 
between 1825 and 1840 was comparatively uneventful. 
The romantic revolution was complete: the new spirit 
had penetrated every corner of literary production^ and 
the various strains introduced from Germany, from Celtic 
sources, from the resuscitated study of natural landscape, 
from the habit of contemplating radical changes in poli- 
tical, religious, and social ideas, had settled down into 
an accepted intellectual attitude, which itself threatened 
to become humdrum and conventional. But this menace 
of a new classicism passed away under the mental storm 
and stress which culminated in 1848, a second and less 
radical revolution on the lines of that which was then 
half a century old, a revolution which had, in English 
literature, the effect of unsettling nothing that was 
valuable in the new romantic tradition, but of scouring 
it, as it were, of the dust and cobwebs which were 
beginning to cloud its surface, and of polishing it to 
the reflection of more brilliant and dehcate aspects of 
nature. 

In this second revival of thought and active expression 
the practice of publishing books grew with a celerity 



VICTORIAN VERSE 335 

which baffles so succinct a chronicle as ours. It be- 
comes, therefore, impossible from this point forwards to 
discuss with any approach to detail the careers of 
individual authors. All that we can now hope to do 
is to show in some degree Ayhat was the general trend 
and what were the main branches of this refreshed and 
giant body of literature. Between the accession of the 
Queen and the breaking out of the war with Russia the 
profession of letters flourished in this country as it had 
never done before. It is noticeable that in the first 
years of the century the men of genius are sharply 
distinguished from the herd of negligible men of talent. 
We recognise some ten or twelve names so far isolated 
from all the rest that, with little injustice, criticism may 
concentrate its attention on these alone. But in the 
second revival this was not the case : the gradations are 
infinitely slow, and a sort of accomplished cleverness, 
highly baffling to the comparative critic, brings us down 
from the summit, along innumerable slopes and invidi- 
ously gentle undulations. Nowhere is it more difficult 
to know whom to mention and whom to omit. 

In poetry, a body of writing which had been kept 
back by the persistent public neglect of its immediate 
inspirers, Shelley and Keats, took advantage of the 
growing fame of those authors to insist on recognition 
for itself. Hence, although Alfred Tennyson had been 
a published author since 1826, the real date of his 
efflorescence as a great, indisputable power in poetry 
is 1842 ; Elizabeth Barrett, whose first volume appeared 
in 1825, does not make her definite mark until 1844; and 
Robert Browning, whose Pauline is of 1833, begins to find 
readers and a discreet recognition in 1846, at the close 
of the series of his Bells and Pomegranates, These three 



336 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

writers, then, formed a group which it is convenient to 
consider together : greatly dissimilar in detail, they pos- 
sessed distinctive qualities in common ; we ma}^ regard 
them as we do Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, or 
Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The vogue, however, of this 
latest cluster of poets was destined to develop more 
slowly, perhaps, but much more steadily and for a 
longer period than that of any previous trio. After fifty 
years of production and increasing popularity two of 
them were still amongst us, in the enjoymeiit of an 
almost unparalleled celebrity. It is important, so far 
as possible, to clear away from our minds the impression 
which half a century of glory has produced, and to see 
how these poets struck their first candid admirers in the 
forties. 

In the first place, it is obvious that their unquestion- 
able merits were dimmed by what were taken to be 
serious defects of style. Oddly enough, it was Alfred 
Tennyson who was particularly assailed for faults which 
we now cheerfully admit in Miss Barrett, who to her 
own contemporaries seemed the most normal of the 
three. That Keats was ^^misdirected'' and '^unripe" 
had been an unchallenged axiom of the critical faculty ; 
but here were three young writers who were calmly 
accepting the formulas of Keats and of ^' his deplorable 
friend Mr. Shelley,'' and throwing contempt on those 
so authoritatively laid down by the Ediitburgh Review. 
Tennyson was accused of triviality, affectation, and 
quaintness. But his two volumes of 1842 were piibhshed 
at a moment when public taste was undergoing a radical 
change. The namby-pamby of the thirties was disgusting 
the younger men, and the new burden imposed by the 
Quarterlies was being tossed from impatient shoulders. 



TENNYSON 337 

When R. H. Home, in 1844, called upon English- 
men to set aside ^' the thin gruel of Kirke White " and 
put to their lips ''the pure Greek wine of Keats/' he 
not only expressed a daring conviction to which many 
timider spirits responded, but he enunciated a critical 
opinion which the discussions of fifty years have not 
superseded. 

What such candid spirits delighted in in the Tennyson 
of 1842 was the sensuous comprehensiveness of his verse. 
He seemed to sumi up, in a composite style to w^hich he 
gradually gave a magic peculiarly his own, the finest 
qualities of the school that had preceded him. He 
studied natural phenomena as closely as Wordsworth 
had, his melodies were almost as hquid and aerial as those 
of Coleridge, he could tell a story as well as Campbell, his 
songs were as pure and ecstatic as Shelley's,' and for 
depth and splendour of colour Keats hardly surpassed 
him. As soon, therefore, as the general pubHc came to 
recognise him, he enchanted it. To an enthusiastic 
Hstener the verse of Tennyson presently appeared to 
sum up every fascinating pleasure which poetry was 
competent to offer, or if anything was absent, it was 
supposed to be the vigour of Byron or the manly 
freshness of Scott. To the elements he collected from 
his predecessors he added a sense of decorative beaut}^, 
faintly archaic and Itahan, an unprecedented refinement 
and high finish in the execution of verse, and a philo- 
sophical sympathy with the broad outHnes of such 
social and religious problems as were engaging the best 
minds of the age. Those who approached the poetry of 
Tennyson, then, were flattered by its polished and dis- 
tinguished beauty, which added to their own self-respect, 
and were repelled by none of those austerities and 



338 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

violences which had estranged the early readers of 
Wordsworth and Shelley. 

Elizabeth Barrett, also, pleased a wade and in- 
fluential circle. Although her w^ork was less pure than 
Tennesson's, and has proved to be less perennial, there 
w^ere many readers of deliberate judgment who preferred 
it to his. Their nerves were pleasurely excited by the 
choral tumult of Miss Barrett's verse, by her generous 
and humane enthusiasm, and by the spontaneous im- 
pulsiveness of her emotion. They easily forgave the 
slipshod execution, the hysterical violence, the Pythian 
vagueness and the Pythian shriek. More critical readers 
were astonished that one who approached the composi- 
tion of poetry w^ith an almost religious sense of responsi- 
bility, whose whole life was dedicated to the highest aims 
of verse, who studied with eclectic passion the first 
classics of every age, should miss the initial charm, and 
should, fresh from Sophocles and Dante, convey her 
thoughts in a stream which was' seldom translucent and 
never calm. In some of her lyrics, however, and more 
rarely in her sonnets, she rose to heights of passionate 
humanity which place her only just below the great 
poets of her country. 

About the year 1850, when, as Mrs. Browning, she was 
writing at her best, all but a few were to be excused 
if they considered her the typical vates, the inspired 
poet of human suffering and human aspiration. But 
her art, from this point onward, declined, and much of 
her late work w^as formless, spasmodic, singularly tune- 
less and harsh, nor is it probable that what seemed 
her premature death, in 1861, was a real deprivation to 
English literature. Mrs. Browning, with great afflatus 
and vigour, considerable beauty of diction, and not a 



ROBERT BROWNING 339 

little capacity for tender felicity of fanciful thought^ had 
the radical fault of mistaking convulsion for strength^ and 
of believing that sublimity involved a disordered and 
fitful frenzy. She was injured by the humanitarian sen- 
timentality which was just coming into vogue, and by 
a misconception of the uses of language somewhat ana- 
logous to that to which Carlyle had resigned himself. 
She suffered from contortions produced by the fumes of 
what she oddly called 

" The lighted altar booinmg der 

The clouds of incense dim a7id hoar'''' \ 

and if ^^the art of poetry had been a less earnest object 
to " her, if she had taken it more quietly, she might have 
done greater justice to her own superb ambition. 

When the youthful Robert Browning, in 1846, 
carried off in clandestine marriage the most eminent 
poetess of the age, not a friend suspected that his fame 
would ever surpass hers. Then, and long afterwards, he 
was to the world merely '^the man who married Elizabeth 
Barrett," although he had already published most of his 
dramas, and above all the divine miracle-play of Pippa 
Passes. By his second book, Paracelsus (1835), he had 
attracted to him a group of admirers, small in number, 
but of high discernment ; these fell off from what seemed 
the stoniness of Strajford and the dense obscurity of 
Sordello. At thu'ty-five Robert Browning found himself 
almost without a reader. The fifteen years of his married 
life, spent mainly in Italy, were years of development, of 
clarification, of increasing selective power. When he 
published Men and Women (1855), whatever the critics 
and the quidnuncs might say. Browning had surpassed 
his wife and had no living rival except Tennyson. He 



340 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

continued, for nearly forty years, to write and publish 
verse ; he had no other occupation, and the results of his 
even industry grew into a mountain. After 1864 he was 
rarely exquisite ; but The Ring and the Book, an immense 
poem in which one incident of Italian crime is shown 
reflected on a dozen successive mental facets, interested 
everybody, and ushered Browning for the first time to 
the great public. 

Browning was in advance of his age until he had be- 
come an elderly man. His great vogue did not begin 
until after the period which we deal with in this chapter. 
From 1870 to 1889 he was an intellectual force of the 
first class ; from 1850 to 1870 he was a curiosity, an 
eccentric product more wondered at than loved or 
followed. His analysis was too subtle, and his habit of 
expression too rapid and transient, for the simple early 
Victorian mind ; before his readers knew what he was 
saying, he had passed on to some other mood or subject. 
The question of Browning's obscurity is one which has 
been discussed until the flesh is weary. He is often 
difBcult to follow ; not unfrequently neglectful, in the 
swift evolution of his thought, whether the listener can 
follow him or not ; we know that he liked ^' to dock the 
smaller parts-o'-speech." In those earlier years of which 
we speak, he pursued with dignity, but with some dis- 
appointment, the role of a man moved to sing to others 
in what they persisted in considering no better than a 
very exasperating mode of pedestrian speech. So that 
the pure style in Browning, his exquisite melody when he 
is melodious, his beauty of diction when he bends to 
classic forms, the freshness and variety of his pictures — 
all this was unobserved, or noted only with grudging and 
inadequate praise. 



DICKENS 341 

The one prose - writer who in years was the exact 
contemporary of these poets^ but who was enjoying a 
universal popularity while they were still obscure, the 
greatest novelist since Scott, the earliest, and in some 
ways still the most typical of Victorian writers, was 
Charles Dickens. English fiction had been straying 
further and further from the pecuUarly national type 
of Ben Jonson and Smollett — the study, that iS; of 
*' humours," oddities, extravagant peculiarities of inci- 
dent and character — when the publication of the Pickivick 
Papers, w^hich began in 1836, at once revealed a new 
writer of colossal genius, and resuscitated that obsolete 
order of fiction. Here was evident not merely an ex- 
traordinary power of invention and bustle of movement, 
but a spirit of such boundless merriment as the literature 
of the world had never seen before. From the book- 
publication of Pickivicky in 1838, until his death, in 1870, 
Dickens enjoyed a popularity greater than that of any 
other living writer. The world early made up its mind 
to laugh as soon as he spoke, and he therefore chose 
that his second novel, Oliver Twist, should be a study in 
melodramatic sentiment almost entirely without humour. 
Nicholas A ickleby combined the comic and the sensa- 
tional elements for the first time, and is still the type of 
Dickens's longer books, in which the strain of violent 
pathos or sinister mystery is incessantly relieved by farce, 
either of incident or description. In this novel, too, the 
easy-going, old-fashioned air of Pickwick is abandoned in 
favour of a humanitarian attitude more in keeping with 
the access of puritanism which the new reign had brought 
with it, and from this time forth a certain squeamishness 
in dealing with moral problems and a certain ^' gush " 
of unreal sentiment obscured the finer qualities of the 



342 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

novelist's genius. The rose-coloured innocence of the 
Pinches, the pathetic deaths, to slow music, of Little 
Nell and Little Dombey, these are examples of a 
weakness which endeared Dickens to his enormous 
public, but w^hich add nothing to his posthumous 
glory. 

The peculiarity of the manner of Dickens is its ex- 
cessive and minute consistency within certain arbitrary 
limits of belief. Realistic he usually is, real he is scarcely 
ever. He builds up, out of the storehouse of his memory, 
artificial conditions of life, macrocosms swarming with 
human vitality, but not actuated by truly human in- 
stincts. Into one of these vivaria we gaze, at Dickens's 
bidding, and see it teeming with movement ; he puts a 
microscope into our hands, and we w^atch, with excited 
attention, the perfectly consistent, if often strangely 
violent and grotesque adventures of the beings com- 
prised in the world of his fancy. His vivacity, his 
versatility, his comic vigour are so extraordinary that 
our interest in the show never flags. We do not inquire 
whether Mr. Toots and Joe Gargery are ^^ possible" 
characters, whether they move and breathe in a common 
atmosphere ; we are perfectly satisfied with the evolu- 
tions through which their fascinating showman puts 
them. But real imitative vitality, such as the characters 
of Fielding and Jane Austen possess, the enchanting 
marionettes of Dickens never display : in all but their 
oddities, they are strangely incorporeal. Dickens leads 
us rapidly through the thronged mazes of a fairy-land, 
now comiCy now sentimental, now horrific, of which we 
know him all the time to be the creator, and it is merely 
part of his originality and cleverness that he manages 
to clothe these radically phantasmal figures with the 



LEVER: MARRYAT 343 

richest motley robes of actual, humdrum, '^reahstic" 
observation. 

For the first ten years of the Victorian era, Dickens 
was so prominent as practically to overshadow all 
competitors. When we look back hastily, we see 
nothing but his prolific puppet-show, and hear nothing 
but the peals of laughter of his audience. There were 
not wanting those who, in the very blaze of his early 
genius, saw reason to fear that his mannerisms and his 
exaggerations would grow upon him. But until 1847 
he had no serious rival ; for Bulwer, sunken between 
his first brilliancy and his final solidity, was producing 
nothing but frothy Zaiionis and dreary Lucretias, while 
the other popular favourites of the moment had nothing 
of the master's buoyant fecundity. High spirits and 
reckless adventure gave attractiveness to the early and 
most rollicking novels of Charles Lever ; but even 
Charles O'Malley, the best of them, needs to be read 
very light-heartedly to be convincing. Frederick 
IMarryat wrote of sailors as Lever did of dragoons, 
but with a salt breeziness that has kept Peter Simple 
and Mr. Midshipman Easy fresh for sixty years. Marryat 
and Lever, indeed, come next to Dickens among the 
masculine novelists of this age, and they, as he is, are 
of the school and following of Smollett. Gay carica- 
ture, sudden bursts of sentiment, lively description, 
broken up by still livelier anecdote, with a great non- 
chalance as to the evolution of a story and the propriety 
of its ornament — these are the qualities which charac- 
terise the novelists of the early Victorian age. In our 
rapid sketch Vx'e must not even name the fashionable 
ladies who undertook at this time, in large numbers, 
to reproduce the foibles and frivolities of ^' society." 



344 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The name of Thomas Carlyle was mentioned in the 
last chapter, and he went on writing until about 1877, 
but the central part of his influence and labour was 
early Victorian. No section of Carlyle's life was so 
important, from a literary point of view, as the first 
period of twelve years in London. In 1833, discomfited 
by persistent want of success, he was on the point of 
abandoning the effort. ^' I shall quit literature ; it does 
not invite me," he wrote. But in this depressed mood 
he sat down to the soUd architecture, toil "stern and 
grim," of the Fre^tch Revolution, composed at Cheyne 
Walk in a sour atmosphere of "bitter thrift." In 1837 
it appeared with great eclat, was followed in 1838 by 
the despised and thitherto unreprinted Sartor ResartuSy 
and by the four famous series of Carlyle's public lectures. 
Of these last, Hei^o Worship was alone preserved. But 
all this prolonged activity achieved for the disappointed 
Carlyle a tardy modicum of fame and fee. He pushed 
the " painting of heroisms " still further in the brilliant 
improvisation called Past and Future, in 1843, and 
with this book his first period closes. He had worked 
down, through the volcanic radicalism of youth, to a 
finished incredulity as to the value of democracy. He 
now turned again to history for a confirmation of his 
views. 

But meanwhile he had revealed the force that was in 
him, and the general nature of his message to mankind. 
His bleak and rustic spirit, moaning, shrieking, roaring, 
like a wild wind in some inhospitable northern wood- 
land, had caught the ear of the age, and sang to it a 
fierce song which it found singularly attractive. First, in 
subject ; after the express materialism of Bentham, Owen, 
and Fourier, prophets of the body, the ideal part of 



CARLYLE 345 

man was happy to be reminded again of its existence, 
even if by a prophet whose inconsistency and whose 
personal dissatisfaction with things in general tended to 
dismay the soul of the minute disciple. It was best not 
to follow the thought of Carlyle too implicitly^ to con- 
sider him less as a guide than as a stimulus, to allow his 
tempestuous and vague nobility of instinct to sweep 
away the coverings of habit and convention, and then 
to begin life anew. Emerson, an early and fervent 
scholar, defined the master's faculty as being to '^clap 
wings to the sides of all the solid old lumber of the 
world." Carlyle's amorphous aspirations excited young 
and generous minds, and it was natural that the preacher 
of so much lawless praise of law should seem a law-giver 
himself. Yet it is difficult to decide what Carlyle has 
bequeathed to us, now that the echoes of his sonorous 
denunciations are at last dying away. Standing be- 
tween the Infinite and the individual, he recognises no 
gradations, no massing of the species ; he compares 
the two incomparable objects of his attention, and scolds 
the finite for its lack of infinitude as if for a preventable 
fault. Unjust to human effort, he barks at mankind like 
an ill-tempered dog, angry if it is still, yet more angry if 
it moves. A most unhelpful physician, a prophet with 
no gospel, but vague stir and turbulence of contradiction. 
We are beginning now to admit a voice and nothing 
more, yet at worst what a resonant and imperial clarion 
of a voice ! 

For, secondly, in manner he surprised and delighted 
his age. Beginning with a clear and simple use of 
English, very much like that of Jeffrey, Carlyle dehbe- 
rately created and adopted an eccentric language of his 
own, which he brought to perfection in Sartor Resartus, 
23 



346 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

Founded on a careful selection of certain Greek and 
German constructions, introduced so as to produce an 
irregular but recurrent effect of emphasis, and at poig- 
nant moments an impression as of a vox humana stop 
in language, skilfully led up to and sustained, the 
euphuism of Carlyle was one of the most remarkable 
instances on record of a deliberately artificial style 
adopted purely and solely for purposes of parade, but 
preserved with such absolute consistency as soon to 
become the only form of speech possible to the speaker. 
Early critics described it as a mere chaos of capitals and 
compounds and broken English ; but a chaos it was not 
■ — on the contrary, it was a labyrinth, of which the power- 
ful and insolent inventor was most careful to preserve 
the thread. 

We have hitherto been speaking of a solvent Carlyle 
as essayist, lecturer, critic, and stripper-off of social 
raiment. It was presently discovered that on one side 
his genius was really constructive. He became the finest 
historian England had possessed since Gibbon. The 
brilliant, episodical French Revolution was followed by 
a less sensational but more evenly finished Cj^omwell in 
1845, and by that profoundly elaborated essay in the 
eighteenth-century history of Germany, the Life of 
Friedrich II., in 1858. By this later work Carlyle out- 
stripped, in the judgment of serious critics, his only 
possible rival, Macaulay, and took his place as the first 
scientific historian of the early Victorian period. His 
method in this class of work is characteristic of him as 
an individualist ; he endeavours, in all conjunctions, to 
see the man moving, breathing, burning in the glow and 
flutter of adventure. This gives an extraordinary vitality 
to portions of Carlyle's narrative, if it also tends to dis- 



MACAULAY 347 

turb the reader's conception of the general progress of 
events. After the pubhcation of the Fried7Hchy Carlyle 
continued to hve for nearly twenty years, writing occa- 
sionally, but adding nothing to his intellectual stature, 
which, however, as time passed on, grew to seem 
gigantic, and was, indeed, not a little exaggerated by the 
terror and amazement which the grim old Tartar pro- 
phet contrived to inspire in his disciples and the world 
in general. 

Born after Carlyle, and dying some twenty years before 
him, Thomas Babington Macaulay pressed into a short 
life, feverishly filled with various activity, as much work 
as Carlyle achieved in all his length of days. The two 
writers present a curious parallelism and contrast, and 
a positive temptation to paradoxical criticism. Their 
popularity, the subjects they chose, their encyclopaedic 
interest in letters, unite their names, but in all essentials 
they were absolutely opposed. Carlyle, with whatever 
faults, w^as a seer and a philosopher ; English literature 
has seen no great writer more unspiritual than Macaulay, 
more unimaginative, more demurely satisfied with the 
phenomenal aspect of life. In Carlyle the appeal is 
incessant — sursum corda ; in Macaulay the absence of 
mystery, of any recognition of the divine, is remarkable. 
Macaulay is satisfied with surfaces, he observes them with 
extraordinary liveliness. He is prepared to be entertain- 
ing, instructive, even exhaustive, on almost every legiti- 
mate subject of human thought ; but the one thing he 
never reaches is to be suggestive. What he knows he 
tells in a clear, positive, pleasing way ; and he knows so 
much that often, especially in youth, we desire no other 
guide. But he is without vision of unseen things ; he 
has no message to the heart ; the waters of the soul are 



348 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

never troubled by his copious and admirable flow of 
information. 

Yet it is a narrow judgment which sweeps Macaulay 
aside. He has been, and probably will long continue to 
be, a most valuable factor in the cultivation of the race. 
His Essays are not merely the best of their kind in exist- 
ence, but they are put together with so much skill that 
they are permanent types of a certain species of hterary 
architecture. They have not the delicate, palpitating life 
of the essays of Lamb or of Stevenson, but taken as 
pieces of constructed art built to a certain measure, fitted 
up with appropriate intellectual upholstery, and adapted 
to the highest educational requirements, there is nothing 
like them elsewhere in literature. The most restive of 
juvenile minds, if induced to enter one of Macaulay's 
essays, is almost certain to reappear at the other end 
of it gratified, and, to an appreciable extent, cultivated. 
Vast numbers of persons in the middle Victorian 
period w^ere mainly equipped for serious conversation 
from the armouries of these dehghtful volumes. The 
didactic purpose is concealed in them by so genuine and 
so constant a flow of animal spirits, the writer is so con- 
spicuously a master of intelligible and appropriate illus- 
tration, his tone and manner are so uniformly attractive, 
and so little strain to the feelings is involved in his 
oratorical flourishes, that readers are captivated in their 
thousands, and much to their permanent advantage. 
Macaulay heightened the art of his work as he pro- 
gressed ; the essays he wrote after his return from India 
in 1838 are particularly excellent. To study the construc- 
tion and machinery of the two great Proconsular essays, 
is to observe Hterature of the objective and phenomenal 
order carried almost to its highest possible perfection. 



MACAULAY 349 

In 1828, in the Edinburgh ReviezUy Macaulay laid down 
a new theory of history. It was to be pictorial and vivid; 
it was to resemble (this one feels was his idea) the 
Waverley Novels. To this conception of history he re- 
mained faithful throughout his career; he probably owed 
it, though he never admits the fact, to the reading of 
Augustin Thierry's Conquete d Angleterj^e, Macaulay had 
been a popular essayist and orator for a quarter of a 
century, when, in 1849, he achieved a new reputation 
as an historian, and from this date to .1852, when 
his health began to give way, he was at the head 
of living Enghsh letters. In his history there meet us 
the same qualities that we find in his essays. He is 
copious, brilliant, everlastingly entertaining, but never 
profound or suggestive. His view of an historical 
period is aKvays more organic than Carlyle's, because 
of the uniformity of his detail. His architectonics are 
excellent; the fabric of the scheme rises slowly before 
us ; to its last pinnacle and moulding there it stands, 
the master-builder expressing his deHght in it by an 
ebullition of pure animal spirits. For half the pleasure 
we take in Macaulay's writing arises from the author's 
sincere and convinced satisfaction with it himself. Of 
the debated matter of Macaulay's style, once almost 
superstitiously admired, now unduly depreciated, the 
truth seems to be that it was as natural as Carlyle's 
was artificial ; it represented the author closely and un- 
affectedly in his faults and in his merits. Its monotonous 
regularity of cadence and mechanical balance of periods 
have the same faculty for alternately captivating and 
exasperating us that the intellect of the writer has. Af ler 
all, Macaulay lies a little outside the scope of those w^ho 
seek an esoteric and mysterious pleasure from stylco He 



3 so MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

loved crowds, and it is to the populace that his life's work 
is addressed. 

If the strongly accentuated and opposed styles of Carlyle 
and Macaulay attracted the majority of lively pens during 
the early Victorian period, there were not wanting those 
who were anxious to return to the unadorned practice of 
an English that should entirely forget its form in the 
earnest desire to say in clear and simple tones exactly 
what it w^anted to say. Every generation possesses such 
writers, but from the very fact of their lack of ambition 
and their heedlessness of the technical parts of composi- 
tion they seldom attain eminence. Perhaps the most 
striking l xeption in our literature is John Henry New- 
man, whose best sermons and controversial essays display 
a delicate and flexible treatment of language, without 
emphasis, without oddity, which hardly arrests any atten- 
tion at first — the reader being absorbed in the argument 
or statement — but which in cojurse of time fascinates, and 
at last somewhat overbalances the judgment, as a thing 
miraculous in its limpid grace and suavity. The style 
which Newman employs is the more admired because of 
its rarity in English ; it would attract less wonder if the 
writer were a Frenchman. If we banish the curious 
intimidation which the harmony of Newman exercises, 
at one time or another, over almost every reader, and 
examine his methods closely, we see that the faults to 
which his writing became in measure a victim in later 
years — the redundancy, the excess of colour, the languor 
and inelasticity of the periods — w^ere not incompatible 
with what we admire so much in the Sennons at St, 
Marys Church and in the pamphlets of the Oxford 
Movement. 

These imperfections in the later works of Newman— 



NEWMAN 351 

obvious enough, surely, though ignored by his bhnd 
admirers — were the result of his preoccupation with other 
matters than form. His native manner, cultivated to a 
high pitch of perfection in the Common Room at Oriel, 
was abundant, elegant, polished, rising to sublimity when 
the speaker was inspired by religious fervour, sinking to 
an almost piercing melancholy when the frail tenor of 
human hopes affected him, barbed w^ith wit and ironic 
humour when the passion of battle seized him. His in- 
tellect, so aristocratic and so subtle, was admirably served 
through its period of storm and stress by the armour of 
this academic style. But when the doubts left Newman, 
when he settled down at Edgbaston among his wor- 
shippers, when all the sovereign questions which his soul 
had put to him Vx'ere answered, he resigned not a little 
of the purity of his style. It was Newman's danger, per- 
haps, to be a little too intelligent ; he was tempted to 
indulge a certain mental indolence, which assailed him, 
vjith mere refinements and facilities of thought. Hence, 
in his middle life, it w^as only wiien roused to battle, 
it was in the Apologia of 1864 and A Grammar of Assent 
of 1870, that the Fenelon of our day rose, a prince of 
religious letters, and shamed the enemies of his com- 
munion by the dignity of his golden voice. But on other 
occasions, taking no thought what he should put on, he 
clothed his speech in what he supposed would best 
please or most directly edify his immediate audience, 
and so, as a mere writer, he gradually fell behind those 
to whose revolutionary experiments his pure and styptic 
style had in early da^^s offered so efficient a rivalry. 
But the influence of the Anglican Newman, now suf- 
fused through journalism, though never concentrated 
in any one powerful disciple, has been of inestimable 



352 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

service in preserving the tradition of sound, unemphatic 
English. 

The fifth decade of the century was a period of 
singular revival in every branch of moral and intel- 
lectual life. Altliough the dew fell all over the rest of 
the threshing-floor, the fleece of literature was not un- 
moistened by it. The years 1847-49 were the most fertile 
in great books which England had seen since 1818-22. It 
was in the department of the novel that this quickening 
of vitality was most readily conspicuous. Fiction took 
a new and brilliant turn ; it became vivid, impassioned, 
complicated ; in the hands of three or four persons of 
great genius, it rose to such a prom.inent place in the 
serious life of the nation as it had not taken since the 
middle career of Scott. Among these new novelists 
who were also great writers, the first position was taken 
by William Makepeace Thackeray, who, though born 
so long before as 181 1, did not achieve his due rank in 
letters until Vanity Fair was completed in 1848. Yet 
much earlier than this Thackeray had displayed those 
very qualities of wit, versatility, and sentiment, cooked 
together in that fascinating and cunning manner whiclf 
it is so difficult to analyse, which were now hailed as an 
absolute discovery. Bainy Lyndon (1840) should have 
been enough, alone, to prove that an author of the first 
class had arisen, who was prepared to offer to the sickly 
taste of the age, to its false optimism, its superficiality, 
the alterative of a caustic drollery and a scrupulous 
study of nature. But the fact was that Thackeray had 
not, in any of those early sketches to which we now 
turn back with so much delight, mastered the technical 
art of story-telling. The study of Fielding appeared to 
reveal to him the sort of evolution, the constructive 



THACKERARY 353 

pertinacity, which had hitherto been lacking. He read 
Jonathan Wild and wrote Barry Lyndon; by a still 
severer act of self - command, he studied Tom Jones 
and composed Vanity Fair. The lesson w^as now 
learned. Thackeray was a finished novelist ; but, ala3 ! 
he was nearly forty years of age, and he was to die at 
fifty-two. The brief remainder of his existence w^as 
crowded with splendid work ; but Thackeray is unques- 
tionably one of those WTiters who give us the impression 
of having more in them than accident ever permitted 
them to produce. 

Fielding had escorted the genius of Thackeray to the 
doors of success, and it became convenient to use the 
name in contrasting the new novelist with Dickens, who 
was obviously of the tribe of Smollett. But Thackeray 
was no consistent disciple of Fielding, and when we 
reach his masterpieces — Esmond, for instance — the re- 
sem.blance between the two writers has become purely 
superficial. Thackeray is more difficult to describe in a 
few words than perhaps any other author of his m.erit. 
He is a bundle of contradictions — slipshod in style, and 
yet exquisitely mannered ; a student of reality in conduct, 
and yet carried away by every romantic mirage of senti- 
ment and prejudice ; a cynic with a tear in his eye, a 
pessimist that believes the best of everybody. The 
fame of Thackeray largely depends on his palpitating 
and almost pathetic vitality ; he suffers, laughs, reflects, 
sentimentalises, and meanw^hile we run beside the giant 
figure, and, looking up at the gleam of the great spec- 
tacles, we share his emotion. His extraordinary power 
of entering into the life of the eighteenth century, and 
reconstructing it before us, is the most definite of his 
purely intellectual claims to our regard. But it is the 



3 54 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

character of the man himself — plaintive, affectionate, 
protean in its moods, like April weather in its changes 
• — that, fused with unusual completeness into his works, 
preserves for us the human intensity which is Thackeray's 
perennial charm as a writer. 

Two women of diverse destiny, but united in certain 
of their characteristics, share with Thackeray the glory 
of representing the most vivid qualities of this mid- 
Victorian school of fiction. In 1847 the w^orld was 
startled by the publication of a story of modern life 
n3.med /a7^e £jre, by an anonymous author. Here were 
a sweep of tragic passion, a broad delineation of ele- 
mental hatred and love, a fusion of romantic intrigue 
with grave and sinister landscape, such as had never been 
experienced in fiction before ; to find their parallel it was 
necessary to go back to the wild drama of EHzabeth. 
Two years later Shirley y and in 1852 Villettej continued, 
but did not increase, the wonder produced h^ Jane Eyre; 
and just when the world was awakening to the fact that 
these stupendous books were written by Miss Charlotte 
Bronte, a schoolmistress, one of the three daughters of 
an impoverished clergyman on the Yorkshire wolds, she 
died, early in 1855, having recently married her father's 
curate. The story of her grey and grim existence at 
Haworth, the struggles which her genius made to disen- 
gage itself, the support she received from sisters but little 
less gifted than herself, all these, constantly revived, form 
the iron framework to one of the most splendid and most 
durable of English literary reputations. 

Neither Charlotte Bronte, however, nor her sisters, 
Emily and Anne, possessed such mechanical skill in the 
construction of a plot as could enable them to develop 
their stories on a firm epical plan. They usually pre- 



MRS. GASKELL 355 

ferred the autobiographic method, because it enabled 
them to evade the constructive difficulty; and when, as 
in Shirlej/y Charlotte adopted the direct form of narra- 
tive, she had to fall back upon the artifice of a school- 
room diary. This reserve has in fairness to be made ; 
and if we desire to observe the faults as well as the 
splendid merits of the Brontean school of fiction, they 
are displayed glaringly before us in the Wuthering Heights 
of Emily, that sinister and incongruous, but infinitely 
fascinating tragedy. 

Much more of the art of building a consistent plot was 
possessed by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell ; indeed, 
she has written one or two short books which are tech- 
nically faultless, and might be taken as types of the novel 
form. Strange to say, the recognition of her delicate and 
many-sided genius has never been quite universal, and 
has endured periods of obscuration. Her work has not 
the personal interest of Thackeray's, nor the intense 
unity and compression of Charlotte Bronte's. It may 
even be said that Mrs Gaskell suffers from having done 
well too many things. She wrote, perhaps, a purer and 
a more exquisite English than either of her rivals, but 
she exercised it in too many fields. Having in Mary 
Barton (1848) treated social problems admirably, she 
threw off a masterpiece of humorous observation in 
Cranford, returned in a different mood to manufac- 
turing life in North and South, conquered the pastoral 
episode in Cousin Phillis, and died, more than rivalling 
Anthony Trollope, in the social-provincial novel of Wives 
and Daughters. Each of these books might have sus- 
tained a reputation ; they were so different that they 
have stood somewhat in one another's wa}^ But the 
absence of the personal magnetism — emphasised by the 



3 56 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

fact that all particulars regarding the life and character 
of Mrs. Gaskell have been sedulously concealed from 
public knowledge — has determined a persistent under- 
valuation of this writer's gifts, which were of a very 
high, although a too miscellaneous order. 

It is impossible, while dealing with these glories of the 
middle Victorian period, to omit, although he still lives, 
all mention of one more glorious still. Full of intel- 
lectual shortcomings and moral inconsistencies as is the 
matter of Mr. John Ruskix, his manner at its best is 
simply incomparable. If the student rejects for the 
moment, as of secondary or even tertiary importance, all 
that j\Ir. Ruskin has written for the last forty years, and 
confines his attention to those solid achievements, the 
first three volumes of Modern Painters, the Stones of 
Venice, and the Se-oen Lamps of Areliitectiire, he will find 
himself in presence of a virtuoso whose dexterity in the 
mechanical part of prose style has never been exceeded. 
The methods which he adopted almost in childhood — 
he was a finished writer b}^ 1837 — were composite ; he 
began bv mingling with the romantic freshness of Scott 
qualities derived from the poets and the painters, '' vial- 
fuls, as it were, of Wordsworth's reverence, Shelley's 
sensitiveness. Turner's accuracy." Later on, to these he 
added technical e'iements, combining with the music of 
the English Bible the reckless richness of the seven- 
teenth-century divines perhaps, but most certainly and 
fatally the eccentric force of Carlyle. If, however, this 
olla-podrida of divergent mannerisms goes to make up 
the style of Ruskin, that st3de itself is one of the most 
definite and characteristic possible. 

What it was which ]\Ir. Ruskin gave to the world under 
the pomp and procession of his effulgent style, it is, per- 



MR. RUSKIN 3 57 

haps, too early yet for us to realise. But it is plain that 
he was the greatest phenomenal teacher of the age ; that, 
dowered with unsurpassed delicacy and swiftness of 
observation, and with a mind singularly unfettered by 
convention, the book of the physical world lay open before 
him as it had lain before no previous poet or painter, 
and that he could not cease from the ecstasy of sharing 
with the public his wonder and his joy in its revelations. 
It will, perhaps, ultimately be discovered that his elabo- 
rate, but often whimsical and sometimes even incoherent 
disquisitions on art resolve themselves into this — the 
rapture of a man who sees, on clouds alike and on 
canvases, in a flower or in a missal, visions of illumi- 
nating beauty, which he has the unparalleled accom- 
pUshment of being able instantly and effectively to 
translate into words. 

The happv life being that in which illusion is most 
prevalent, and 'Mr. Ruskin's enthusiasm having fired 
more minds to the instinctive quest of beauty than that 
of any other man who ever lived, we are guilty of no 
exaggeration if we hail him as one of the first of bene- 
factors. Yet his intellectual nature was from the start 
imperfect, his sympathies alwavs violent and para- 
doxical ; there were whole areas of life from which 
he was excluded ; and nothing but the splendour and 
fulness of his golden trumpets concealed the fact that 
some important instruments were lacking to his orchestra. 
It is as a purely descriptive writer that he has always been 
seen at his best, and here he is distinguished from exotic 
rivals — at home he has had none — by the vivid moral 
excitement that dances, an incessant sheet-lightning, 
over the background of each gorgeous passage. In this 
effect of the metaph3'sical temperament, Mr. Ruskin is 



3 58 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

sharply differentiated from Continental masters of de- 
scription and art initiation — ^from Fromentin, for in- 
stance, with whom he may be instructively contrasted. 

The excessive popularity enjoyed by the writings of 
John Stuart Mill at the time of his death has already 
undergone great diminution, and will probably continue 
to shrink. This eminent empirical philosopher was a 
very honest man, no sophist, no rhetorician, hut one 
who, in a lucid, intelligible, convincing style, placed 
before English readers views of an advanced character, 
with the value of which he was sincerely impressed. 
The world has since smiled at the precocious artificiality 
of his education, and has shrunk from something arid 
and adust in the character of the man. Early associated 
with Carlyle, he did not allow himself to be infected by 
Carlylese, but carefully studied and imitated the French 
philosophers. His System of Logic (1843) and his Political 
Economy (1848) placed his scientific reputation on a firm 
basis. But Mill could be excited, and even violent, in 
the cause of his convictions, and he produced a wider, 
if not a deeper impression by his remarkable sociological 
essays on Liberty (1859) and the Subjection of Women, 
He is, unfortunately for the durability of his writings, 
fervid without being exhilarating. Sceptical and dry, 
precise and plain, his works inspire respect, but do not 
attract new generations of admirers. 

The greatest of Victorian natural philosophers, Charles 
Darwin, was a man of totally different calibre. He had 
not the neatness of Mill's mind, nor its careful literary 
training, and he remained rather unfortunately indifferent 
to literary expression. But he is one of the great arti- 
ficers of human thought, a noble figure destined, in utter 
simplicity and abnegation of self, to perform one of the 



CHARLES DARWIN 359 

most stirring and inspiring acts ever carried out by a 
single intelligence, and to reawaken the sources of 
human enthusiasm. Darwin's great suggestion, of life 
evolved by the process of natural selection, is so far- 
reaching in its effects as to cover not science only, but 
art and literature as well ; and he had the genius to 
carry this suggested idea, past all objections and ob- 
stacles, up to the station of a biological system the most 
generally accepted of any put forth in recent times. In 
the years of his youth there was a general curiosity 
excited among men of science as to the real origins of 
life ; it became the glory of Charles Darwin to sum up 
these inquiries in the form of a theory which was slowly 
hailed in all parts of the world of thought as the only 
tenable one. From 1831 to 1836 he had the inestimable 
privilege of attending, as collecting naturalist, a scientific 
expedition in the w^aters of the southern hemisphere. 
After long meditation, in 1859 his famous Origin of 
Species was given to the public, and awakened a furious 
controversy. In 1871 it was followed by the Descent of 
Man, which, although more defiant of theological pre- 
judice, w^as, owing to the progress of evolutionary ideas 
in the meanwhile, more tamely received. Darwin lived 
long enough to see the great biological revolution, which 
he had inaugurated, completely successful, and — if that 
was of importance to a spirit all composed of humble 
simplicity — his name the most famous in the intellectual 
world. 



XI 

THE AGE OF TENNYSON 

The record of half a century of poetic work performed 
by Alfred Tennyson between 1842, when he took his 
position as the leading poet after Wordsworth, and 1892, 
when he died, is one of unequalled persistency and sus- 
tained evenness of flight. If Shakespeare had continued 
to write on into the Commonwealth, or if Goldsmith 
had survived to welcome the publication of Sense and 
Sensibility^ these might have been parallel cases. The 
force of Tennyson was twofold : he did not yield his 
pre-eminence before any younger writer to the very last, 
and he preserved a singular uniformity in public taste 
in poetry by the tact with which he produced his con- 
tributions at welcome moments, not too often, nor too 
irregularly, nor so fantastically as to endanger his hold 
on the popular suffrage. He suffered no perceptible 
mental decay, even in the extremity of age, and on his 
deathbed, in his eighty-fourth year, composed a lyric as 
perfect in its technical delicacy of form as any which he 
had written in his prime. Tennyson, therefore, was a 
power of a static species : he was able, by the vigour 
and uniformity of his gifts, to hold English poetry 
stationary for sixty years, a feat absolutely unparalleled 
elsewhere ; and the result of various revolutionary move- 
ments in prosody and style made during the Victorian 

360 



TENNYSON 361 

age was merely in every case temporary. There was 
an explosion, the smoke rolled away, and Tennyson's 
statue stood exactly where it did before. 

In this pacific and triumphant career certain critical 
moments may be mentioned. In each of his principal 
writings Tennyson loved to sum up a movement of 
popular speculation. In 1847 feminine education was in 
the air, and the poet published his serio-comic or senti- 
mentalist-satiric educational narrative of the Princess, the 
most artificial of his works, a piece of long-drawn ex- 
quisite marivaudage in the most softly gorgeous blank 
verse. In 1850, by inevitable selection, Tennyson suc- 
ceeded Wordsworth as Laureate, and published anony- 
mously the monumental elegy of In Memoriam. This 
poem had been repeatedly taken up since the death, 
seventeen years before, of its accomplished and be- 
loved subject, Arthur Hallam. As it finally appeared, 
the anguish of bereavement was toned down by time, 
and an atmosphere of philosophic resignation tempered 
the whole. What began in a spasmodic record of 
memories and intolerable regret, closed in a confession 
of faith and a repudiation of the right to despair. The 
skill of Tennyson enabled him to conceal this irregular 
and fragmentary construction ; but In Memoriam remains 
a disjointed edifice, with exquisitely carved chambers and 
echoing corridors that lead to nothing. It introduced 
into general recognition a metrical form, perhaps in- 
vented by Ben Jonson, at once so simple and so salient, 
that few since Tennyson have ventured to repeat it, in 
spite of his extreme success. 

The Crimean war deeply stirred the nature of Tenny- 
son, and his agitations are reflected in the most feverish 
and irregular of all his principal compositions, the Maud 
24 



362 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

of 1855. This volume contains ample evidence of a 
hectic condition of feeling. It is strangely experimental ; 
in it the poet passes on occasion further from the classical 
standards of style than anywhere else, and yet he rises 
here and there into a rose-flushed ecstasy of plastic 
beauty that reminds us of what the statue must have 
seemed a moment after the breath of the Goddess en- 
flamed it. The volume of 1855 is an epitome of all 
Tennyson in quintessence — the sumptuous, the simple, 
the artificial, the eccentric qualities are here ; the passion- 
ately and brilliantly uplifted, the morbidly and caustically 
harsh moods find alternate expression ; the notes of 
nightingale and night- jar are detected in the strange 
antiphonies of this infinitely varied collection. 

For the remainder of his long hfe Tennyson concen- 
trated his talents mainly on one or two themes or classes 
of work. He desired to excel in epic narrative and in 
the drama. It will be found that most of his exertions 
in these last five-and-twenty years took this direction. 
From his early youth he had nourished the design of 
accomplishing that task which so many of the great poets 
of England had vainly desired to carry out, namely, the 
celebration of the national exploits of King Arthur. In 
1859 the first instalment of Idylls of the Kz7ig \\?i?>y after 
many tentative experiments, fairly placed before the 
public, and in 1872 the series closed. In 1875 Tennyson 
issued his first drama, Queen Mary ; and in spite of the 
opposition of critical opinion, on the stage and off it, he 
persisted in the successive production of six highly 
elaborated versified plays, of which, at length, one, 
Beckety proved a practical success on the boards. That 
the enforced issue of these somewhat unwelcome dramas 
lessened the poet's hold over the public was obvious, and 



TENNYSON 363 

almost any other man in his seventy-sixth year would 
have acquiesced. But the artistic energy of Tennyson 
v^^as unconquerable, and with a juvenile gusto and a 
marvellous combination of politic tact and artistic passion 
the aged poet called the public back to him with the 
four irresistible volumes of ballads, idyls, songs, and 
narratives of which the Tiresias of 1885 was the first, and 
the Death of Qinone of 1892 the fourth. It would be 
idle to pretend that the enchanting colours were not a 
little faded, the romantic music slightly dulled, in these 
last accomplishments ; yet, if they showed something of 
the wear and tear of years, they were no " dotages," to 
use Dryden's phrase, but the characteristic and still 
admirable exercises of a very great poet w^ho simply was 
no longer young. When, at length, Tennyson passed 
away, it was in the midst of such a paroxysm of national 
grief as has marked the demise of no other English 
author. With the just and reverent sorrow for so dear a 
head, something of exaggeration and false enthusiasm 
doubtless mingled. The fame of Tennyson is still, and 
must for some years continue to be, an element of dis- 
turbance in our literary history. A generation not under 
the spell of his personal magnificence of mien will be 
called upon to decide what his final position among the 
English poets is to be, and before that happens the 
greatest of the Victorian luminaries will probably, for a 
moment at least, be shorn of some of his beams. 

The long-drawn popularity of the mellifluous and 
poHshed poetry of Tennyson would probably have re- 
sulted, in the hands of his imitators, in a fatal laxity 
and fluidity of style. But it was happily counteracted 
by the example of Robert Browning, who asserted 
the predominance of the intellect in analytic production, 



364 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and adopted forms which by their rapidity and naked- 
ness were specially designed not to cover up the mental 
process. If the poetry of the one was like a. velvety 
lawn, that of the other resembled the rocky bed of a 
river, testifying in every inch to the volume and velocity 
of the intellectual torrent which formed it. So, a couple 
of centuries before, the tumultuous brain of Donne had 
been created to counterpoise and correct the voluptuous 
sweetness of the school of Spenser. If any mind more 
original and powerful than Browning's had appeared in 
English poetry since Donne, it was Dryden, in whose 
masculine solidity, and daring, hurrying progression of 
ideas, not a little of the author of The Ring and the 
Book may be divined. But if Donne had subtlety and 
Dryden weight, in Browning alone can be found, com- 
bined with these qualities, a skill in psychological 
analysis probably unrivalled elsewhere save by Shake- 
speare, but exerted, not in dramatic relation of character 
with character, but in self-dissecting monologue or web 
of intricate lyrical speculation. 

In Browning and Tennyson alike, the descent from 
the romantic writers of the beginning of the century was 
direct and close. Each, even Browning with his cosmo- 
politan tendencies, was singularly Enghsh in his line of 
descendence, and but little affected by exotic forces. 
Each had gaped at Byron and respected Wordsworth ; 
each had been dazzled by Shelley and had given his 
heart to Keats. There is no more interesting object- 
lesson in literature than this example of the different 
paths along which the same studies directed two poets 
of identical aims. Even the study of the Greeks, to 
which each poet gave his serious attention, led them 
further and further from one another, and we may 



BRO¥/NING 365 

find \vh?tt resemblance we may between Tithonus and 
Cleorty where the technical form is, for once, iden- 
tical. Tennyson, loving the phrase, the expression, 
passionately, and smoothing it and caressing it as a 
sculptor touches and retouches the marmoreal bosom 
of a nymph, stands at the very poles from Browning, 
to whom the verbiage is an imperfect conductor of 
thoughts too fiery and too irreconcilable for balanced 
speech, and in whom the craving to pour forth re- 
dundant ideas, half-molten in the lava turmoil, is not 
to be resisted. There have been sculptors of this class, 
too — Michelangelo, Rodin — hardly to be recognised as 
of the same species as their brethren, from Praxiteles 
to Chapu. But the plastic art embraces them all, as 
poetry is glad to own, not the Lotus - Eaters only, but 
Sordello also, and even Fifine at the Fair, 

The course of Browning's fame did not run with the 
Tennysonian smoothness any more than that of his 
prosody. After early successes, in a modified degree — 
Paracelsus (1835), even Strafford (1837) — the strenuous 
epic narrative of Sordello (1840), written in a sort of 
crabbed shorthand w^hich even the elect could hardly 
penetrate, delayed his appreciation and cast him back 
for many years. The name of Robert Browning became 
a byword for wilful eccentricity and inter-lunar dark- 
ness of style. The successive numbers of Bells and 
Pomegranates (1841-46) found him few admirers in a 
cautious public thus forewarned against his ^^ obscurity," 
and even Pippa Passes, in spite of its enchanting moral 
and physical beauty, was eyed askance. Not till 1855 
did Robert Browning escape from the designation of 
^' that unintelligible man who married the poet " ; but 
the publication of the two volumes of Men and Wo?ncn, 



366 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

in which the lyrical and impassioned part of his genius 
absolutely culminated, displayed, to the few who have 
eyes to see, a poet absolutely independent and of the 
highest rank. 

Then began, and lasted for fifteen years, a period in 
which Browning, to a partial and fluctuating degree, was 
accepted as a powder in English verse, with his little band 
of devotees, his wayside altars blazing with half-prohi- 
bited sacrifice ; the official criticism of the hour no longer 
absolutely scandalised, but anxious, so far as possible, to 
minimise the effect of all this rough and eccentric, yet 
not '* spasmodic " verse. In Dramatis Personce (1864), 
published after the death of his wife, some numbers 
seemed glaringly intended to increase the scandal of 
obscurity ; in others, notably in Rabbi Ben Ezra, heights 
were scaled of melodious and luminous thought, which 
could, by the dullest, be no longer overlooked ; and 
circumstances were gradually preparing for the great 
event of 1868, when the publication of the first volume 
of The Ring and the Book saw the fame of Browning, so 
long smouldering in vapour, burst forth in a glare that 
for a moment drowned the pure light of Tennyson 
himself. 

From this point Browning was sustained at the height 
of reputation until his death. He was at no moment 
within hailing distance of Tennyson in popularity, but 
among the ruling class of cultivated persons he enjoyed 
the splendours of extreme celebrity. He was, at last, 
cultivated and worshipped in a mode unparalleled, 
studied during his lifetime as a classic, made the object 
of honours in their very essence, it might have been 
presupposed, posthumous. After 1868 he lived for more 
than twenty years, publishing a vast amount of verse, 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 367 

contained in eighteen volumes, mostly of the old 
analytic kind, and varying in subject rather than in 
character. In these he showed over and over again the 
durable force of his vitality, which in a very unusual 
degree paralleled that of Tennyson. But although so 
constantly repeating the stroke, he cannot be said to 
have changed its direction, and the volume of the blow 
grew less. The publication of these late books was 
chiefly valuable as keeping ahve popular interest in the 
writer, and as thus leading fresh generations of readers 
to what he had published up to 1868. 

As a poet and as a prose-writer Matthew Arnold 
really addressed two different generations. It is not 
explained why Arnold waited until his thirty-eighth year 
before opening with a political pamphlet the extensive 
series of his prose works. As a matter of fact it was not 
until 1865 that, wdth his Essays in Criticism^ he first 
caught the ear of the pubHc. But by that time his career 
as a poet was almost finished. It is by the verses he 
printed between 1849 and 1855 that Matthew Arnold 
put his stamp upon English poetry, although he added 
characteristic things at intervals almost until the time of 
his death in 1888. But to comprehend his place in the 
history of literature we ought to consider Arnold twice 
over — firstly as a poet mature in 1850, secondly as a prose- 
writer whose masterpieces date from 1865 to 1873. In 
the former capacity, after a long struggle on the part of 
the critics to exclude him from Parnassus altogether, it 
becomes generally admitted that his is considerably the 
largest name between the generation of Tennyson and 
Browning and that of the so-called pre-Raphaelites. Be- 
sides the exquisite novelty of the voice, something was 
distinctly gained in the matter of Arnold's early poetry — 



368 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

a new atmosphere of serene thought was here, a philoso- 
phical quality less passionate and tumultuous, the music 
of Hfe deepened and strengthened. Such absolute purity 
as his is rare in English poetry ; Arnold in his gravity 
and distinction is like a translucent tarn among the 
mountains. Much of his verse is a highly finished 
study in the manner of Wordsworth, tempered with 
the love of Goethe and of the Greeks, carefully avoiding 
the perilous Tennysonian note. His efforts to obtain 
the Greek effect led Matthew Arnold into amorphous 
choral experiments, and, on the whole, he was an in- 
different metrist. But his devotion to beauty, the com- 
posure^ simplicity, and dignity of his temper, and his 
deep moral sincerity, gave to his poetry a smgular charm 
which may prove as durable as any element in modern 
verse. 

The Arnold of the prose was superficially a very dif- 
ferent writer. Conceiving that the English controversial- 
ists, on whatever subject, had of late been chiefly engaged 
in ^' beating the bush with deep emotion, but never start- 
ing the hare," he made the discovery of the hare his 
object. In other words, in literature, in politics, in 
theology, he set himself to divide faith from superstition, 
to preach a sweet reasonableness, to seize the essence 
of things, to war against prejudice and ignorance and 
national self-conceit. He w'as-full of that ''amour des 
choses de I'esprit" which Guizot had early perceived in 
him ; he was armed with a delicious style, trenchant, 
swift, radiantly humorous ; but something made him 
inaccessible, his instincts were fine and kindly without 
being really sympathetic, and he was drawn away from 
his early lucidity to the use of specious turns of thought 
and sophisms. We live too close to him, and in an inteb 



GEORGE ELIOT 369 

lectual atmosphere of which he is too much a component 
part^ to be certain how far his beautiful ironic prose- 
writings will have durable influence. At the present 
moment his prestige suffers from the publication of two 
posthumous volumes of letters, in which the excellence 
of Matthew Arnold's heart is illustrated, but which are 
almost without a flash of genius. But his best verses are 
incomparable, and they will float him into immortality. 

Charlotte Bronte died in 1855, Thackeray in 1862, Eliza- 
beth Gaskell in 1865. GEORGE Eliot (Marian Evans), 
although born in the same decade, began to write so late 
in life and survived so long that she seemed to be part of 
a later generation. From the death of Dickens in 1870 
to her own in 1880, she was manifestly the most pro- 
minent novelist in England. Yet it is important to 
realise that, like all the other Victorian novelists of 
eminence until we reach Mr. George Meredith, she was 
born in the rich second decade of the century. It was 
not until some years after the death of Charlotte Bronte 
that Scenes of Clerical Life revealed a talent which owed 
much to the bold, innovating spirit of that great woman, 
but which was evidently exercised by a more academic 
hand. The style of these short episodes was so delicately 
brilliant that their hardness was scarcely apparent. 

The Scejtes certainly gave promise of a writer in the first 
rank. In Adam Bede^ an elaborate romance of bygone 
provincial manners, this promise was repeated, although, 
by an attentive ear, the under-tone of the mechanism was 
now to be detected. In the Mill on the Floss and Silas 
Marner a curious phenomenon appeared — George Eliot 
divided into two personages. The close observer of 
nature, mistress of laughter and tears, exquisite in the 
intensity of cumulative emotion, was present still, but she 



370 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

receded ; the mechanician^ overloading her page with 
pretentious matter, working out her scheme as if she were 
building a steam-engine, came more and more to the 
front. In Felix Holt and on to Daniel Deronda the second 
personage preponderated, and our ears were deafened 
by the hum of the philosophical machine, the balance of 
scenes and sentences, the intolerable artificiality of the 
whole construction. 

George Eliot is a very curious instance of the danger 
of self-cultivation. No writer was ever more anxious to 
improve herself and conquer an absolute mastery over 
her material. But she did not observe, as she entertained 
the laborious process, that she was losing those natural 
accomplishments which infinitely outshone the philo- 
sophy and science which she so painfully acquired. She 
was born to please, but unhappily she persuaded herself, 
or was persuaded, that her mission was to teach the 
world, to lift its moral tone, and, in consequence, an 
agreeable rustic writer, with a charming humour and 
very fine sympathetic nature, found herself gradually 
uplifted until, about 1875, she sat enthroned on an educa- 
tional tripod, an almost ludicrous pythoness. From the 
very first she had been weak in that quality which more 
than any other is needed by a novelist, imaginative in- 
vention. So long as she was humble, and was content to 
reproduce, with the skilful subtlety of her art, what she 
had personally heard and seen, her work had delightful 
merit. But it was an unhappy day w^hen she concluded 
that strenuous effort, references to a hundred abstruse 
writers, and a whole technical system of rhetoric would 
do the wald-wood business of native imagination. The 
intellectual self-sufficiency of George Eliot has suffered 
severe chastisement. At the present day scant justice is 



A. TROLLOPE: C. READE 371 

done to her unquestionable distinction of intellect or 
to the emotional intensity of much of her early work. 

Two writers of less pretension exceeded George Eliot 
as narrators, though neither equalled her in essential 
genius at her best. In Anthony Trollope English 
middle-class life found a close and loving portrait-painter, 
not too critical to be indulgent nor too accommodating to 
have flashes of refreshing satire. The talent of Trollope 
forms a link between the closer, more perspicuous natural- 
ism of Jane Austen and the realism of a later and coarser 
school. The cardinal merit of the irregular novels of 
Charles Reade was their intrepidity ; the insipid tend- 
ency of the early Victorians to deny the existence of 
instinct received its death-blow from the sturdy author 
of Griffith Gaunty who tore the pillows from all arm- 
holes, and, by his hatred of what was artificial, sacerdotal, 
and effeminate, prepared the way for a freer treatment 
of experience. His style, although not without serious 
blemishes, and ill sustained, has vigorous merits. Through 
the virile directness of Charles Reade runs the chain which 
binds Mr. George Meredith and Mr. Hardy to the early 
Victorian novelists. 

A certain tendency to the chivalric and athletic ideals 
in life, combining a sort of vigorous Young Englandism 
with enthusiastic discipleship of Carlyle, culminated in 
the breezy, militant talent of Charles Kingsley. He 
was full of knightly hopes and generous illusions, a 
leader of ^'Christian Socialists," a filter against wind- 
mills of all sorts. He worked as a radical and sporting 
parson in the country, finding leisure to write incessantly 
on a hundred themes. His early novels, and some of his 
miscellaneous treatises, written half in jest and half in 
earnest, enjoyed an overwhelming success. But Kingsley 



372 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

had no judgment, and he overestimated the range of his 
aptitudes. He fancied himself to be a controversiahst 
and an historian. He engaged in pubhc contest with a 
strong man better armed than himself, and he accepted 
a professorial chair for which nothing in his training had 
fitted him. His glory was somewhat tarnished, and he 
died sadly and prematurely in 1871. But his best books 
have shown an extraordinary tenacity of life, and though 
he failed in many branches of literature, his successes 
in one or two seem permanent. In verse, his ballads 
are excellent, and he made an experiment in hexa- 
meters which remains the best in Enghsh. If his early 
socialistic novels begin to be obsolete, Hypatia and 
Westwai'd Ho! have borne the strain of forty years, 
and are as fresh as ever. The vivid style of Kingsley 
was characteristic of his violent and ill-balanced, but 
exquisitely cheery nature. 

With Kingsley's should be mentioned a name which, 
dragged down in the revulsion following upon an ex- 
cessive reputation, is now threatened by an equally 
unjust neglect. With Kingsley there came into vogue 
a species of descriptive writing, sometimes very appro- 
priate and beautiful, sometimes a mere shredding of the 
cabbage into the pot. To achieve success in this kind 
of literature very rare gifts have to be combined, and 
not all who essay to ^Mescribe " present, an image to our 
mental vision. In the more gorgeous and flamboyant 
class Mr. Ruskin had early been predominant ; in a 
quieter kind, there was no surer eye than that of 
Arthur Penryn Stanley. Quite early in his career 
he attracted notice by an excellent Life of Dr. Arnold 
(1844) ; but the peculiar phenomenal faculty of which 
we are here speaking began to be displayed much later in 



FROUDE 373 

his Sinai and Palestine — where, save in the use of colour, 
he may be compared with M. Pierre Loti — and in his 
extremely vivid posthumous correspondence. It will be 
a pity if, in the natural decay of what was ephemeral in 
Stanley's influence, this rare visual endowment be per- 
mitted to escape attention. 

A group of historians of unusual vivacity and merit 
gave to the central Victorian period a character quite 
their own. Of these writers — warm friends or bitter 
enemies in personal matters, but closely related in the 
manner of their work — five rose to particular eminence. 
Two of them are happily still with us, and are thus 
excluded from consideration here. This is the less im- 
portant, perhaps, in that the purely literary elements of 
this school of history are to be sought much less in the 
Bishop of Oxford and Dr. S. R. Gardiner than in Froude, 
Freeman, and Green. Of the group, James Anthony 
Froude was the oldest, and he was at Oxford just at 
the time when the Tractarian Movement was exciting 
all generous minds. Greatly under the influence of 
Newman in the forties, Froude took orders, and was 
closely connected with the High Church party. With 
this group Freeman also, though less prominently, was 
and remained allied, and his anger was excited when 
Froude, instead of following Newman to Rome, or 
staying with the agitated Anglican remnant, announced 
his entire defection from the religious system by the 
publication of the Nemesis of Faith in 1849. From 
this time forth the indignation of Freeman was con- 
centrated and implacable, and lasted without inter- 
mission for more than forty years. The duel between 
these men was a matter of such constant public enter- 
tainment that it claims mention in a history, and 



374 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

distinctly moulded the work of both these interesting 
artists. 

In the line taken up by Froude he owed something 
to the advice of Carlyle, more to the spirit of close and 
sympathetic research inculcated by Sir Francis Palgrave. 
He set himself to a History of England from the Fall of 
Wolsey to the Destruction of the Spanish Armada^ and 
this huge work, in twelve volumes, was completed in 
1870. Attacked by specialists from the very first, this 
book was welcomed with ever-increasing warmth by the 
general public. Froude had an extraordinary power of 
holding the interest of the reader, and he appealed 
directly, and with seldom-failing success, to the instincts 
of the average man. He was curiously unaffected by 
those masters of popular history who held the ear of 
the world during his youth ; he bears little trace of 
Macaulay and none of Carlyle in the construction of his 
sentences. He held history to be an account of the 
actions of men, and he surpassed all his English pre- 
decessors in the exactitude with which he seemed to 
re-embody the characters and emotions of humanity, 
blowing the dust away from the annals of the past. 
That he was a partisan, that he was violently swayed 
(as pre-eminently in his magnificent rehabilitation of 
Henry VIII.) not so much by a passion for facts as 
by philosophical prejudices, took away from the durable 
value of his writing, but not from its immediate charm. 
Froude possessed in high degree that faculty of imagi- 
native and reproductive insight which he recognised as 
being one of the rarest of qualities ; unhappily, it cannot 
be said that he possessed what he himself has described 
as "the moral determination to use it for purposes of 
truth only." 



FREEMAN 375 

But if it is impossible to admit that Froude had the 
infatuation for veracity which may coexist with an 
inveterate tendency to blunder about details, there are 
yet very sterling merits in Froude's work w^hich the 
attacks of his enemies entirely fail to obscure. If we 
compare him with Hallam and Macaulay, we see a regular 
advance in method. With all his judicial attitude, Hallam 
seldom comprehends the political situation, and never 
realises personal character ; Macaulay, though still unable 
to achieve the second, accurately measures the first ; 
Froude, with astonishing completeness, is master of both. 
It is this which, together with the supple and harmonious 
beauty of his periods, gives him the advantage over that 
estimable and learned, but somewhat crabbed writer, 
Edward Augustus Freeman, whose great History of 
the Norman Conquest was completed in 1876. It is 
said that Froude worked up his authorities, inflamed 
his imagination, and then, with scarcely a note to 
help his memory, covered his canvas with a flowing 
brush. Freeman, on the other hand, is never out of 
sight of his authorities, and in many instances, through 
pages and pages, his volumes are simply a cento of 
paraphrases from the original chroniclers. He gained 
freshness, and, when his text was trustworthy, an ex- 
treme exactitude ; but he missed the charm of the fluid 
oratory of narrative, the flushed and glowing improvisa- 
tion of Froude. In consequence, the style of Freeman 
varies so extremely that it is difficult to ofler any general 
criticism of it. In certain portions of the Harold, for 
instance, it reaches the very nadir of dreariness ; while 
his famous '^ night which was to usher in the ever- 
memorable morn of Saint Calixtus " suggests how finely 
he might have persuaded himself to see and to describe. 



376 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The cardinal gift of Freeman, however, was certainly 
not his painstaking treatment of documents, but the re- 
markable breadth of his historic view. I have heard that 
he once said that he never could decide whether modern 
history should begin with Napoleon I. or with the 
prophet Abraham. In one or the other case he saw the 
great map of history outrolled before his mental vision 
as perhaps no other man has seen it ; and when to a 
portion of the vast subject so sanely comprehended he 
applied his rare analytical genius, the result was surpris- 
ingly convincing. The utterances of Freeman on the 
large trend of historical philosophy are therefore of 
particular value, and it is regrettable that that they are 
comparatively few. It is on this side of his genius that 
his influence on younger historians has been so great. In 
John Richard Green a poet in history combined the pic- 
turesqueness of Froude with something of the exactitude 
and breadth of Freeman. The Short History of the English 
People y in 1874, produced a sensation such as is rarely 
effected in these days by any book that is not a master- 
piece of imaginative art. It treated history in a new vein, 
easily, brightly, keenly, sometimes with an almost jaunty 
vivacity. The danger of Green lay in his excess of poetic 
sensibility, his tendency to be carried away by his flow of 
animal spirits, to confound what was with what must or 
should have been ; but he was a delightful populariser 
of history, a man of strongly emphasised character who 
contrived to fascinate a world of readers by charging his 
work with evidences of his own gay subjectivity. 

A tradition, handed down, perhaps, from the practice 
of the schoolmen, encourages philosophy to dispense 
with all aesthetic aids to expression. The names of 
Berkeley and Hume are sufficient to remind us that 



MR. HERBERT SPENCER 377 

these barren and rigid forms of technical language are not 
obligatory, but Locke and Butler are almost excluded 
from, mention in the history of style by the repulsive 
bareness of their diction. Nor is the greatest philo- 
sopher of these latest times in any way solicitous about 
the form of his address, which is yet at times, and when 
he warms to his subject, sympathetic and persuasive. 
But there are two reasons, among many, why the name 
of Mr. Herbert Spencer must not be omitted from 
such a summary as ours : firstly, because no Englishman 
of his age has made so deep an intellectual impression 
on foreign thought, or is so widely known throughout 
Europe ; and, secondly, because of the stimulating effect 
which his theories have exercised over almost every 
native author of the last twenty years. 

Mr. Spencer adopted from Auguste Comte, who in- 
vented the term, the word ^' sociology," which implies a 
science of politics and society. He started from the 
position of Comte, but he soon went much further. 
His central theory is that society is an organism, a 
form of vital evolution, not to be separated from the 
general growth of Man. It follows that Mr. Spencer 
is an ultra-individualist, who brings, not biology only, 
but. all precedent forces of knowledge to the aid of his 
ideas. He summons us to witness, in all phases of 
existence, the vast cosmical process of evolution pro- 
ceeding. His admirers have not failed to point out 
that in his Principles of Psychology {1855) ^^ theory of 
Darwin was foreseen. But Mr. Spencer did not become 
a power in thought until long after that time. His 
most famous works appeared between 1872 and 1884. 
The world, unable to grasp his grander conceptions, 
has been greatly entertained by his lighter essays, in 
25 



3/8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

which his personal style appears to most advantage. 
He warns us of the perils the individual runs in the 
extension of the responsibilities of the State. He fights 
against the coming slavery of socialism. He sharply 
distinguishes the duty of the family from the charge 
of the State, and has even dared to attack the divine 
right of Parliaments. But these are but straws floating 
on the flood of his enormous theory of sociological 
phenomena. 

From the large class who have adorned and enriched 
the natural sciences with their investigations and obser- 
vations, there project two men whose gift for elegant and 
forcible expression was so great as to win for them a 
purely literary reputation also. Such men grow rare 
and rarer, as the statement of scientific fact tends to 
become more and more abstruse and algebraic. John 
Tyndall, the physicist, conciliated critical opinion by 
the courage with which he insisted on the value of the 
imagination in the pursuit of scientific inquiry. He had 
remarkable rhetorical gifts, and in his early publications 
on mountain structure he cultivated a highly coloured 
style, influenced by Ruskin, and even by Tennyson. 
Perhaps the best-written of his philosophical treatises 
is the Forms of Water (1872), where his tendency to 
polychromatic rodomontade is kept in some check. A 
purer and a manlier style was that of Thomas Henry 
Huxley, the "biologist, whose contributions to contro- 
versy, in which he showed a rem_arkable courage and 
adroitness, were published as Lay Sermons, Addresses, 
and Reviews, in 1870. It was Huxley's passion to ''war 
upon the lions in the wood," and his whole life through 
he was attacking the enemies of thought, as he conceived 
them, and defending the pioneers of evolution. In the 



HUXLEY 379 

arena of a sort of militant philosophical essay, the colour 
of which he borrowed in measure from his beloved 
Hume, Huxley was ready for all comers, and acquitted 
himself with unrivalled athletic prowess. Of his morpho- 
logical and physiographical work this is no place to 
speak. 

The w^ealth of secondary verse in the central Victorian 
period was great, but it is not possible to preserve the 
proportion which regulates this volume and yet record 
its features here in detail. Certainly, on the face of 
things, no poet (except Arnold) between Browning 
and the pre-Raphaelites constrains our attention. The 
tendency to be affected by the polished amenity - of 
Tennyson's style was successively experienced by gene- 
rations, not one of which found itself strong enough to 
rise in successful revolt. In the middle of the century 
a group of writers, inspired by the study of Goethe's 
Faust ^ and anxious to enlarge the emotional as well as 
the intellectual scope of British verse, attempted a revo- 
lution which preserves some historical interest. Both 
Tennyson and Browning were violently affected by their 
experiments, which closely resembled those of the much 
later Symbolists in France. The more impressionist 
and irregular passages of Maud are, in fact, the most 
salient records in English literature of *' spasmodic " 
poetry, the actual leaders of which are now of Httle note. 

The Tennysonian tradition, however, put a great strain 
on the loyalty of young writers, and at length a move- 
ment was organised which involved no rebellion against 
the Laureate, but a very valuable modification of the 
monotony of his methods. The emergence of a compact 
body of four poets of high rank between 1865 and 1870 
is a fact of picturesque importance in our literary history. 



3 8o MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

The impulse seems to have been given to them, in the 
first instance, by the writings and the personal teachings 
of Mr. Ruskin ; on their style may be traced the stamp 
of a pamphlet, long disdained, which becomes every year 
more prominent in its results. It would be difficult to say 
what was exactly the effect on the pre-Raphaelites of the 
paraphrase of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam published 
in 1859 by Edward Fitz-Gerald, but the melody of this 
translation, and its peculiar fragrance, were the most 
original elements introduced into English verse for forty 
.years. The strange genius of Fitz-Gerald, so fitfully and 
coyly revealed, has given a new quality to English verse, 
almost all recent manifestations of which it pervades. 

If, however, the quickening effect of the frail leaf of 
intoxicating perfume put forth by Fitz-Gerald is manifest 
on the prosody of the poets of 1870, far different influ- 
ences are to be traced in the texture of their style. Their 
genius was particularly open to such influences, for their 
charm was the composite charm of a highly elaborated 
and cultivated product, by the side of which even the 
polish of Tennyson at first appeared crude and primitive. 
The attraction of the French romances of chivalry for 
William Morris, of Tuscan painting for D. G. Rossetti, of 
the spirit of English Gothic architecture for Christina 
Rossetti, of the combination of all these with Greek and 
Elizabethan elements for Mr. Swinburne, were to be 
traced back to start-words given by the prophetic author 
of the Seven Lamps of Architecture. In each case, finding 
that the wine of imaginative writing had become watered 
in England, their design was to crush anew in a fiery 
vintage v/h X Keats had ciUed '' Joy's grape." 

These poets were all mediaeval in their spirit, but with 
a.medix^val sm Ih t .sv.^cpt them on, not to asceticisms 



THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 381 

of an intellectual species, but to a plastic expansion in 
which they achieved a sort of new renaissance. In them 
all, even in the saintly Christina, the instinct of physical 
beauty w^as very strongly developed ; each of them was 
a phenomenal and sensuous being, dried up in the east 
wind of mere moral speculation, and turning to pure, 
material art, with its technical and corporeal qualities, for 
relief and satisfaction. They found the texture of those 
species of poetry in w^hich they desired to excel much 
relaxed by the imitation of imitations of Tennyson. 
That great poet himself v\as in some danger of succumb- 
ing to flattery of what was least admirable in his talent. 
The date of their first books — the Defence of Guenevere 
(1858), Goblin Market^ the Early Italian Poets, and the 
Queen J\I other and I\osa7no7id {siW 1861) — gives a false im- 
pression of the place the four poets occupy in the history 
of influence, for these volumes hardly attracted even 
the astonishment of the public, and the publication of 
Atalanta in Calydon (1865) really marked the beginning 
of a sensation which culminated in the overwhelming 
success of D. G. Rossetti's Poems in 1870. 

For a moment the victory of the four, exacerbating 
the public mind in some cases with elements of mystery, 
scandal, and picturesque inscrutabihty, tended to confuse 
the real development of Victorian poetry. At first, in their 
blaze of colour and blare of trumpets, nothing else was 
heard or seen. Then, as the landscape quieted again, the 
great figures were rediscovered in the background — 
Tennyson as dominant as ever, with a new freshness of 
tint ; Browning extremely advanced, lifted from the 
position of an eccentricity to be an object of worship ; 
Matthew Arnold the poet dragged from the obscurity to 
which his prose successes had condemned him ; while a 



382 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

number of small celebrities who had been enjoying an 
exaggerated esteem found themselves fatally relegated 
to a surprising inferiority. In short, what had been 
conceived to be the disturbing introduction of these 
young people of genius, of this generation of knockers 
at the door, had set the critical balance of matters 
straight again, and had given the really considerable 
personages of an elder time an opportunity to assert 
their individual forces. 

But another matter of importance, which was hardly 
perceived at the time, now calls for emphatic state- 
ment in the briefest survey of Victorian poetry. It 
was in the verse of these so-called revolutionaries 
that the dogmas of the original naturalists of 1795 
found their fullest and most conservative echo. No 
poet since Coleridge's day, not even Tennyson, had 
understood the song, as that master had conceived it, 
with more completeness than Christina Rossetti; no poet 
since Keats, not even Tennyson, had understood the 
mission of Keats better than D. G. Rossetti did. And in 
these writers of 1865 the school of ecstasy and revoU, 
with its intermixture of mysticism, colour, melody, and 
elaboration of form, reached its consistent and deliberate 
culmination. Into the question of their relative degree 
of merit it would be premature .to inquire here ; we are 
chiefly concerned with the extraordinary note of vitality 
which these four poets combined to introduce into 
English imaginative literature, founded, in the truest 
spirit of evolution, on an apprehension and adaptation 
of various elements in precedent art and letters. 

Almost immediately upon the apparition of the so- 
called *' pre-Raphaelite " poets, and in many cases in 
positive connection with them, there happened a great 



WALTER PATER 383 

and salutary quickening of the spirit of literary criticism 
in England. It remained largely individualist, and there- 
fore hable to an excess of praise and blame which was 
not philosophical in character or founded upon a just 
conception of the natural growth of literary history. 
But the individual judgments became, to a marked de- 
gree, more fresh, more suggestive, more penetrating, and 
were justified by greater knowledge. The influence of 
French methods was apparent and wholly beneficial. 
The severer spirits read Sainte Beuve to their healing, and 
as years went on the more gorgeous pages of Theophile 
Gautier and Paul de St. Victor were studied in England 
by those who undertook most conscientiously the task 
of literary criticism. The time has, happily, not come 
to discuss with any fulness the merits and shortcomings 
of a school still labouring among us ; but the most original 
and the most philosophical of the group, Walter Pater, 
has been too remarkable a force in our generation to 
remain unnamed here. During his lifetime of more than 
fifty years. Pater never succeeded in achieving more than 
a grudging and uncertain recognition from his contem- 
poraries. He died, almost obscure, in 1894, and since 
that time his fame, and above all his influence, have 
been rising by leaps and bounds. As it was till lately 
desirable to demand attention for the splendid propor- 
tions of his prose, so full and stately in its ornate harmony, 
so successful in its avoidance of the worn and obvious 
tricks of diction, its slender capitals so thickly studded 
with the volutes and spirals of concentrated ornament, 
so now a word seems no less to be needed lest Pater 
should be ignorantly imitated, a word of warning against 
something heavy, almost pulpy, in his soft magnificence 
of style. His deliberate aim was the extraction from 



384 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

literature, from art, of ^^ the quickened sense of life." 
As he loved to say with Novalis, philosophiren ist vivi- 
fidre7z, and the task of the best criticism is to maintain 
the ecstasy of intellectual experience. The mind of 
Pater underwent an austere metamorphosis in advancing 
years, but this elevated hedonism of his youth enclosed 
his main gift to his generation. 

We are, however, in danger of entangling our impres- 
sions with one another if we pursue too low down the 
threads which we have attempted to hold through more 
than five centuries from Langland and Chaucer to Huxley 
and Pater. We must drop them here, leaving them loose, 
for they are parts of a hving organism, and we cannot 
presume to say in what direction their natural growth 
will lead them next, nor what relative value their parts 
may take in fuller perspective. We have spoken of nothing 
which was not revealed in its general aspect and direction 
at least five-and-twenty years ago. In periods of very 
rapid literary development this would be a time long 
enough to bring about the most startling changes. Within 
the boundaries of one quarter of a century the English 
drama did not exist, and Hamlet was complete. In 1773 
Dr. Johnson accompanied Boswell to the Hebrides, and 
in 1798 the Ly ideal Ballads were published. But there is 
no evidence to show that the twenty-five years through 
which we have just passed have been years of a very 
experimental tendency. Fifteen or twenty of them were 
overshadowed, and their production stunted, by the per- 
manence of great, authoritative personages, still in full 
activity. The age was the age of Tennyson, and he held 
his kingship, an absolute monarch, against all comers, 
until his death in 1892. We may anticipate that future 
historians may make that date the starting-point for a 



CONCLUSION 385 

new era, but this is for us scarcely matter even for 
speculation. Up to 1892, certainly, we can affirm the 
maintenance, without radical change of any kind, of the 
original romantic system, now just one hundred years 
old. With a myriad minor variations and adaptations, 
poetry in England, and therefore prose, is still what it 
became when Wordsworth and Coleridge remodelled it in 
1797 in the coombes of the Quantocks. 



V. 



EPILOGUE 

In attempting to follow the course of a great literature 
and to survey the process of its growth, one reflection can 
never escape the historian, however little it may gratify his 
vanity. He forms his opinions, if he be fairly instructed 
and tolerably conscientious, on a series of aesthetic prin- 
ciples, guided in their interpretation by the dictates of 
his own temperament. There has as yet been dis- 
covered no surer method of creating a critical estimate 
of literature ; and yet the fragility and vacillation of this 
standard is patent to every one whose brains have not 
become ossified by vain and dictatorial processes of 
^'teaching." Nowhere is an arrogant dogmatism so 
thoroughly out of place than in a critical history of style. 
In our own day we have read, in the private letters of 
Matthew Arnold — one of the most clairvoyant observers 
of the last generation— judgments on current books and 
men which are already seen to be patently incorrect. 
The history of literary criticism is a record of conflicting 
opinion, of blind prejudice, of violent volte -faces^ of 
discord and misapprehension. If we could possess the 
sincere opinions of Ben Jonson, Dryden, Addison, Vol- 
taire, Hazlitt, Goethe, and M. Jules Lemaitre on Havtlet, 
we should probably doubt that the same production 
could be the subject of them all. In the seventeenth 

century Shakespeare was regarded as one of a multi- 

386 



EPILOGUE 387 

tude, a little more careless and sometimes a little more 
felicitous than his fellows. To the eighteenth century 
he became a Gothic savage, in whose ^^wood-notes wild" 
the sovereignty of Nature was reasserted, as if by acci- 
dent. It was left to the nineteenth century to discover 
in him the most magnificent of the conscious poetic 
artists of the world. But what will the twentieth 
century think ? 

We are not, I think, so helpless as these admissions 
and examples would indicate, nor is there the least 
valid reason why we should withdraw from the ex- 
pression of critical opinion because of the dangers 
which attend it. I must hold, in spite of the censure 
of writers of an older school who possess every claim 
upon my gratitude and my esteem, that certain changes 
have recently passed over human thought w^hich alter 
the whole nature of the atmosphere in which criticism 
breathes. A French professor of high repute has attacked, 
as an instance of effrontery and charlatanism, the idea that 
we can borrow for the study of literature help from the 
methods of Darwin and Hackel. He scoffs at the notion 
of applying to poetry and prose the theory which supposes 
all plant and animal forms to be the result of slow and 
organic modification. With every respect for the autho- 
rity of so severe a censor, I venture to dissent entirely 
from his views. I believe, on the contrary, that what 
delays the progress of criticism in England, where it is 
still so primitive and so empirical, is a failure to employ 
the immense light thrown on the subject by the illustra- 
tions of evolution. I believe that a sensible observation 
of what Darwin and Mr. Herbert Spencer have demon- 
strated ought to aid us extremely in learning our trade as 
critics and in conducting it in a business-like manner. 



388 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

In the days of the Jesuits^ when modern criticism 
began in Europe, it was the general opinion that 
Hterature had been created, fully armed, in polite an- 
tiquity ; that Homer — especially Homer as explained by 
Aristotle — had presented the final perfection of literature. 
If any variation from this original archaic type was ever 
observed, it must be watched with the greatest care ; for 
if it was important, it must be dangerous and false. The 
only salvation for style was to be incessantly on one's 
guard to reject any offshoots or excrescences which, 
however beautiful they might seem in themselves, were 
not measurable by the faultless canon of antiquity. The 
French critics, such as Rapin and Bossu, w^ere saved by 
their suppleness of intelligence and by dealing solely 
with a Latin people from the monstrosities which befell 
their Teutonic and English adherents. But it is in- 
structive to see w^here persistence in this theory of the 
unalterable criterium lands an obstinate writer like 
Rymer. He measures everybody, Shakespeare among 
the rest, on the bed of Procrustes, and lops our giants 
at the neck and the knees. 

The pent-up spirit of independence broke forth in 
that Battle of the Ancients and Moderns which is of so 
much secondary interest in the chronicles of literature. 
People saw that we could not admit that there had been 
in extreme antiquity a single act of special literary crea- 
tion constituting once for all a set of rigid types. But 
the Jesuits had at least possessed the advantage of an 
idea, monstrous though it might be. Their opponents 
simply rejected their view, and had nothing definite to 
put in its place. Nothing can be more invertebrate than 
the criticism of the early eighteenth century. Happy, 
vague ideas, glimmering through the mist, supplied a 



EPILOGUE 389 

little momentary light and passed away. Shaftesbury, 
amid a great deal of foppery about the Daemon which 
inspires the Author with the Beautiful and the Amiable, 
contrived to perceive the relation between poetry and 
the plastic arts, and faintly to formulate a system of 
literary aesthetics. Dennis had the really important 
intuition that we ought to find out what an author 
desires to do before we condemn him for what he has 
not done. Addison pierced the bubble of several pre- 
posterous and exclusive formulas. But England was as 
far as the rest of Europe from possessing any criterium 
of literary production which could take the place of the 
rules of the Jesuits. Meanwhile, the individualist method 
began to come into vogue, and to a consideration of this 
a few words must be spared. 

The individualist method in literary criticism has been 
in favour with us for at least a century, and it is still in 
vogue in most of our principal reviews. It possesses 
in adroit hands considerable effectiveness, and in its 
primary results may be entirely happy. It is in its 
secondary results that it leads to a chaotic state of 
opinion. It is, after all, an adaptation of the old theory 
of the unalterable type, but it merely alternates for the 
one ^^ authority of the Ancients" an equal rigidity in a 
multitude of isolated modern instances. It consists in 
making a certain author, or fashion, or set- of aesthetic 
opinions the momentary centre of the universe, and in 
judging all other literary phenomena by their nearness 
to or remoteness from that arbitrary point. At the 
beginning of the present century it seduced some of 
the finest minds of the day into ludicrous and grotesque 
excesses. It led Keats into his foolish outburst about 
Boileau, because his mind was fixed on Beaumont 



390 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

and Fletcher. It led De Quincey to say that both the 
thought and expression of one of Pope's most perfect 
passages were *^ scandalously vicious/' because his mind 
was fixed on Wordsworth. In these cases Wordsworth 
and Fletcher were beautiful and right ; but Pope and 
Boileau were, on the surface, absolutely in opposition 
to them ; Pope and Boileau were therefore hideous and 
wrong. Yet admirers of classic poetry have never ceased 
to retort from their own equally individualist point of 
view, and to a general principle of literary taste we find 
ourselves none the nearer. What wonder if the outside 
world treats all critical discussion as the mere babble of 
contending flute-players ? 

But what if a scientific theory be suggested which 
shall enable us at once to take an intelligent pleasure in 
Pope and in Wordsworth, in Spenser and in Swift ? Mr. 
Herbert Spencer has, with infinite courage, opened the 
entire world of phenomena to the principles of evolu- 
tion, but we seem slow to admit them into the little 
province of aesthetics. We cling to the individualist 
manner, to that intense eulogy which concentrates its 
rays on the particular object of notice and relegates all 
others to proportional obscurity. There are critics, of 
considerable acumen and energy, who seem to know 
no other mode of nourishing a talent or a taste than 
that which is pursued by the cultivators of gigantic 
gooseberries. They do their best to nip off all other 
buds, that the juices of the tree of fame may be con- 
centrated on their favourite fruit. Such a plan may be 
convenient for the purposes of malevolence, and in 
earlier times our general ignorance of the principles 
of growth might well excuse it. But it is surely time 
that we should recognise only two criteria of literary 



EPILOGUE 391 

judgment. The first is primitive, and merely clears the 
ground of rubbish ; it is, Does the work before us, or 
the author, perform what he sets out to perform with 
a distinguished skill in the direction in which his powers 
are exercised ? If not, he interests the higher criticism 
not at all ; but if yes, then follows the second test : 
Where, in the vast and ever-shifting scheme of literary 
evolution, does he take his place, and in what relation 
does he stand, not to those who are least like him, but 
to those who are of his own kith and kin ? 

At the close, then, of a rapid summary of the features 
of literary expression in England, I desire to state my 
conviction that the only way to approach the subject 
with instruction is to regard it as part of the history of 
a vast living organism, directed in its manifestations by 
a definite, though obscure and even inscrutable law of 
growth. A monument of poetry, hke that which Tenny- 
son has bequeathed to us, is interesting, indeed, as the 
variegated product of one human brain, strongly indi- 
vidualised by certain qualities from all other brains 
working in the same generation. But we see little if we 
see no more than the lofty idiosyncrasy of Tennyson. 
Born in 1550 or in 1720, he would have possessed the 
same personality, but his poetry, had he written in verse, 
could have had scarcely a remote resemblance to what 
we have now received from his hand. What we are in 
the habit of describing as *' originality " in a great modern 
poet is largely an aggregation of elements which he has 
received by inheritance from those who have preceded 
him, and his ^^ genius" consists of the faculty he possesses 
of selecting and rearranging, as in a new pattern or 
harmony, those elements from many predecessors which 
most admirably suit the only ^'new" thing about him, 



392 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

his unique set of personal characteristics. Tennyson is 
himself ; his work bears upon it the plain stamp of a 
recurrent, consistent individuality. Yet it is none the 
less almost an amalgam of modified adaptations from 
others. The colour of Tennyson would not be what it is 
if Keats had never lived, nor does his delicacy of observa- 
tion take its line of Hght without a reference to that of 
Wordsworth. The serried and nervous expression of 
Pope and the melodic prosody of Milton have passed, by 
a hereditary process, into the veins of their intellectual 
descendant. He is a complex instance of natural selec- 
tion, obvious and almost geometrical, yet interfering not 
a whit with that counter-principle of individual variation 
which is needful to make the poet, not a parasite upon his 
artistic ancestors, but an independent output from the 
main growing organism. And what is patently true of 
this great representative poet of our days is in measure 
true also of the smallest and apparently the most eccen- 
tric writer in prose or verse, if he writes well enough to 
exist at all. Every producer of vital literature adds an 
offshoot to the unrolling and unfolding organism of 
literary history in its ceaseless processes of growth. 



BIOGRAPHICAL LIST 



OF AUTHORS MENTIONED IN THIS VOLUME 



Addison, Joseph 


. 1672-1719 


Akenside, Mark 


. 1721-1770 


Arbuthnot, John ^. 


. 1667-1735 


Arnold, Matthew . 


. 1822-1888 


AscHAM, Roger 


. 1515-1568 


Austen, Jane . 


. 1775-1817 


Bacon, Francis, Viscount St. Albans 1560-1626 


Bage, Robert . . . . . . 


. 1728-1801 


Barbour, John .... 


I3i6(?)-i395 


Barclay, Alexander 


1475(0-1552 


Barrow, Isaac . . . . 


. 1630-1677 


Beaumont, Francis 


. 1584-1616 


Beaumont, Sir John 


. 1582-1627 


Beddoes, Thomas Lovell . 


. I 803- I 849 


Bentley, Richard . 


. 1662-1742 


Berkeley, George .... 


• 1685-1753 


Berners, John Bourchier, Lord 


. 1467-1533 


Blair, Robert .... 


. 1699-1746 


Blake, William .... 


. i757-"t827 


Blind Harry 


/. 15th Cent. 


BOLINGBROKE, ViSCOUNT 


. 1678-175 1 


BoswELL, James .... 


. 1740-1795 


Bowles, William Lisle 


. 1762-1850 



26 



393 



394 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Broke, Arthur 

Bronte, Charlotte 

Bronte, Emily 

Browne, Sir Thomas 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 

Browning, Robert 

Brunton, Mary 

BuNYAN, John . 

Burke, Edmund 

Burney, Fanny 

Burns, Robert 

Burton, Robert 

Butler, Joseph 

Butler, Samuel 

Byron, Lord . 

Campbell, Thomas 
Campion, Thomas 
Capgrave, John 
Carew, Thomas 
Carlyle, Thomas 
Carte, Thomas 
Cartwright, William 
Cavendish, George 
Caxton, William . 
Chapman, George . 
Chattertcn, Thomas 
Chaucer, Geoffrey 
Chesterfield, Earl of 
Chillingworth, William 
Churchill, Charles 
Churchyard, Thomas 
Clanvowe, Sir Thomas 



d. 1563 

. 1816-1855 

. 1818-1848 

. 1605-1682 

. 1809-1861 

. 1812-1889 

. 1778-1818 

. 1628-1688 

. 1729-1797 

. 1752-1840 

. 1759-1796 

. 1577-1640 

. 1692-1752 

. 1612-1680 

. 1788-1824 

. 1777-1844 
i567(?)-i62o 
. 1393-1464 
i598(?)-i639(?) 
. 1795-1881 
. 1686-1754 
. 1611-1643 
i5oo-i56i(?) 
i422(?)-i49i 

i559(?)-i634 
• 1752-1770 
i34o(?)-i4oo 
. 1694-1773 
. 1602-1644 
. 1731-1764 
1520 (?)-i 604 
fl. circa 1400 



BIOGRAPHICAL LIST 



395 



Clarendon, Earl of 
Clarke, Samuel 
Coleridge, Hartley 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 
Collins, William . 
CoNGREVE, William 
Constable, Henry . 
Coverdale, Miles . 
Cowley, Abraham . 
Cowper, William . 
Crabbe, George 
Cranmer, Thomas . 
Crashaw, Richard . 

Daniel, Samuel 
Darwin, Charles . 
Darwin, Erasmus . 
Davenant, Sir William 
Davys, Sir John 
Defoe, Daniel 
Dekker, Thomas 
Denham, Sir John . 
Dennis, John . 
De Quincey, Thomas 
Dickens, Charles . 
Disraeli, Benjaj\iin 
D' Israeli, Isaac 
Donne, John . 
Douglas, Gawin 
Drayton, Michael . 
Drummond, William 
Dryden, John ^ 
Dunbar, William . 



1608-1674 
1675-1729 
I 796-1 849 
1772-1834 
1721-1759 
1670-1729 
1562-1613 
1488-1568 
1618-1667 
1731-1800 
1754-1832 
1489-1556 
161 2-1649 

1562-1619 

1809-1882 

1731-1802 

1606-1668 

i565(?)-i6i8 

1661 (?)-i73i 

i57o(?)-i64i(?) 

1615-1669 

1657-1734 
1785-1859 

1812-1870 
I 804-1 88 I 
1766-1848 
1573-1631 
1474(0-1522 
1563-1631 
1585-1649 
1631-1700 
i46o(?)-i52o(?) 



396 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Edgeworth, Maria 
Eliot, George (Evans, Marian) 
Etheredge, Sir George 
Evelyn, John . 

Farquhar, George . 
Fergusson, Robert 
Ferrier, Susan 
Fielding, Henry . 
Fitz-Gerald, Edward 
Fletcher, Giles 
Fletcher, John 
Fletcher, Phineas . 
Ford, John 
FORTESCUE, Sir John 
FoxE, John 

Freeman, Edward Augustus 
Froude, James Anthony 
Fuller, Thomas 

Galt, John 

Garth, Sir Samuel 

Gascoigne, George 

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn 

Gay, John 

Gibbon, Edward 

GiFFORD, William 

Gilpin, William 

Godwin, William 

Golding, Arthur 

Goldsmith, Oliver 

GooGE, Barnabee 

GowER, John • 



I 767-1 849 

1819-1880^ 

634-1693 (?) 

1620-1706 

1678-1707 
1750-1774 
1782-1854 
1707-1754 
I 809-1 883 
:585(?)-i623 
1579-1625 
1582-1650 
i586(?)-i639 
i394(?)-i476(?) 

1517-1587 
1823-1892 

1818-1894 

1608-1661 

1779-1839 
1661-1719 

525(?)-i577 
1810-1865 
1685-1732 
1737-1794 
1756-1826 
1724-1804 
1756-1836 
/. i6th Cent. 
1728-1774 

1540-1594 
1325(0-1408 



BIOGRAPHICAL LIST 



397 



Gray, Thomas . 
Green, John Richard . 
Greene, Robert 
Grimald, Nicholas . 

Habington, William 

Halifax, George Savile, Marquis of 

Hall, Joseph . 

Hallam, Henry 

Hawes, Stephen 

Hazlitt, William . 

Henryson, Robert. 

Herbert, George . 

Hereford, Nicholas of 

Herrick, Robert . 

Heywood, John 

Heywood, Thomas . 

Hobbes, Thomas 

HoLiNSHED, Raphael 

Hood, Thomas 

Hooker, Richard . 

Hope, Thomas. 

HoRNE, Richard Hengist 

Howell, James 

Hume, David . 

Hunt, Leigh . 

Huxley. Thomas Henry 



James I. of Scotland 
James, G. P. R. 
Jeffrey, Francis, Lord 
Johnson, Samuel . 
JONSON, Benjamin . 



. 1716-1771 

. 1837-1883 
i56o(?)-i592 
. 1519-1562 

. 1605-1654 

1633-1695 

. 1574-1656 

• 1777-1859 
. ^. i523(?) 
. 1778-1830 

i43o(?)-i5o6(?) 

. 1593-1633 
/. 1390 

• 1591-1674 
i497(?)-i58o(?) 
i57q(?)-i65o(?) 

1588-1679 
^. i58o(?) 
1799-1845 
1554-1600 

i77o(?)-i83i 
1803-1884 

i594(?)-i666 
1711-1776 
1784-1859 
1825-1895 

1394-1437 
1801-1860 

1773-1850 
I 709-1 784 

1574-1637 



398 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Keats, John 
Kennedy, Walter . 
KiNGSLEY, Charles . 
Kyd, Thomas . 

Lamb, Charles 
Landor, Walter Savage 
Langland, William 
Latimer, Hugh 
Law, William . 
Lee, Nathaniel 
Lever, Charles James 
Lingard, John . 
Locke, John . 
LocKHART, John Gibson 
Lodge, Thomas 
Lovelace, Richard 
Lydgate, John 
Lyly, John 
Lyndsay, Sir David 
Lytton, First Lord 



. 1795-1821 

i46o(?)-i5o7 

. 1819-1875 

/. 1590 

. 1775-1834 

. 1775-1864 

i33o(?)-i4oo(?) 

i485(?)-i555 
1686-1761 
1655-1692 
1806-1872 
1771-1851 
1632-1704 

1793-1854 

i557(?)-i625 

. 1618-1658 

i372(?)-i448(?) 

i553(?)-i6o6 

• 1490-1555 
. 1803-1873 



Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord . 1800-1859 
Macpherson, James .... 1736-1796 
Malory, Sir Thomas . . . /. 15th Cent. 
Mandeville, Bernard de . i67o(?)-i733 

Marlowe, Christopher. . . . 1564-1593 
Marryat, Frederick .... 1792-1848 
Marston, John .... i57o(?)-i634 

Marvell, Andrew 1621-1678 

Massinger, Philip 1584-1640 

MiDDLETON, Thomas . . . i57o(?)-i627 
Mill, John Stuart .... 1806-1873 



BIOGRAPHICAL LIST 



399 



Milton, John . 
MiTFORD, William . 
Moore, Thomas 
More, Sir Thomas . 
MoRiER, James Justinian 
Morris, William 



Napier, Sir William Francis Patrick 
Nash, Thomas . 
Newman, John Henry 
North, Sir Thomas 
Norton, Thomas 



1608-1674 
1744-1827 
1779-1852 

1478-1535 
1780-1849 

1834-1896 



Occleve, Thomas . 
Oldham, John . 
Orrery, Roger Boyle, 
Otway, Thomas 
OvERBURY, Sir Thomas 



Earl 



Paine, Thomas 

Palgrave, Sir Francis 

Parnell, Thomas . 

Pater, Walter Horatio 

Peacock, Thomas Love 

Pearson, John. 

Pecock, Reginald 

Peele, George 

Pepys, Samuel. 

Percy, Thomas 

Phaer, Thomas 

Pope, Alexander 

Porter, Jane . 

Praed, Winthrop Mackwqrth 



OF 



1785-1860 
. 1567-1601 
. 1801-1890 
/. 1 6th Cent. 
. 1532-1584 



i37o(?)-i45o(?) 
1653-1683 
1621-1679 
1652-1685 
1581-1613 



1737-ii 

1788-1861 

1679-1718 

1839-1894 

1785-1866 

1613-1686 

1390-1460 

i55o(?)-i598 
1633-1703 
1729-1811 

5io(?)-i56o 
1688-1744 
1776-1850 
1802-1839 



400 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Preston, Thomas . 
Price, Sir Uvedale 
Priestley, Joseph . 
Prior, Matthew , 

QuARLES, Francis . 

Raleigh, Sir Walter . 

Randolph, Thomas . 

Reade, Charles 

Richardson, Samuel 

Rivers, Anthony Woodville, Earl 

Robertson, William 

Rogers, Samuel 

Rossetti, Christina 

RossETTi, Dante Gabriel 

RusKiN, Mr. John . 

Russell, Thomas . 



Sackville, Thomas . 
Scott, Sir Walter. 
Shaftesbury, A. A., Third 
Shakespeare, William . 
Shelley, Mary 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 
Shirley, James 
Sidney, Sir Philip . 
Skelton, John 
Smith, Sydney 
Smollett, Tobias . 
SouTHEY, Robert . 
Spencer, Mr. Herbert . 
Spenser, Edmund . 



Earl 



OF 



1537-1598 
1747-1829 
1733-1804 
I 664-1 72 I 

1592-1644 

1552-1618 

1605-1635 

1814-1884 

1689-1761 

d. 1483 

1721-1793 

1763-1855 

1830-1894 

. 1828-1882 

b. 1819 

1762-1' 



1536-1608 
1771-1832 

, 1671-1713 
1564-1616 
1798-1851 
1792-1822 
I 596-1 666 
1554-1586 

46o(?)-i52o 
1771-1845 
1721-1771 
1774-1843 
b. 1820 
1552-1599 



BIOGRAPHICAL LIST 



401 



Stanley, Arthur Pexryn 

Stanley, Thomas . 

Stanyhurst, Richard 

Steele, Richard 

Sterne, Laurence . 

Still, John 

Strode, Ralph 

Suckling, Sir John 

Surrey, Earl of . 

Swift, Jonathan 

Swinburne, Mr. Algernon Charles 



1815-1881 
1625-1678 
1547-1618 
1672-1729 
1713-1768 
1543-1607 
/. 14th Cent. 
1609-1643 

1517-1547 
1667-1745 

b, 1837 



Taylor, Jeremy 
Temple, Sir William 
Tennyson, Alfred, First Lord 
Thackeray, William Makepeace 
Thomson, James 
TiCKELL, Thomas 
TiLLOTSON, John 
TouRNEUR, Cyril . 
Trollope, Anthony 

TURBERVILE, GeORGE 

Turner, Sharon 
Tyndale, William . 
Tyndall, John 

Udall, Nicholas 
UsK, Thomas . 

Vanbrugh, Sir John 
Vaughan, Henry 

Vaux, Thomas, Lord 



i6i3(?)-i667 
. 1628-1699 
. 1809-1892 
. 1811-1863 
. 1700-1748 
. I 686-1 740 
. 1630-1694 
/. 17th Cent. 
. 1815-1882 
i53o(?)-i6oo(?) 
. 1768-1847 
. 1484-1536 
. 1820-1893 

. 1504-1556 
d. 1388 

. 1672-1726 
. 1621-1695 
. 1511-1562 



402 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 



Waller, Edmund , 
Walpole, Horace . 
Walton, Izaak 
Warton, Thomas . 
Watson, Thomas 
Webster, John 
Wells, Charles Jeremiah 
White, Gilbert 
Wilson, John . 
Wilson, Thomas 
Wither, George 
Wordsworth, Dorothy 
Wordsworth, William . 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas 
Wycherley, William 
Wycliffe, John 
Wyntoun, Andrew of . 



Young, Edward . . , • . 1681-1765 



. 1605-1687 

. 1717-1797 

• 1593-1683 

. 1728-1790 

. 1557-1592 
/. 17th Cent. 
. 1800-1879 
. 1720-1793 
i622(?)-i696(?) 
i526(?)-i58i(?) 
1588-1663 

i77i-"t855 
1770-1850 

1503-1542 

1640-1715 

1324-1384 

fl, 15th Cent. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

To a sketch of the history of English literature it is hardly 
possible to append a useful bibliography which shall 
not be of extravagant dimensions. Merely to chronicle 
what has been performed by native scholars and critics 
would require a volume in itself. But it may possibly 
be of some service to readers to indicate briefly what 
has been most recently published in the earlier pro- 
vinces of the subject, and what books will aid the 
student in obtaining an exact acquaintance with par- 
ticular epochs and lives. I make no scruple in men- 
tioning first, for this particular purpose, those popular 
collections prepared by many hands, the English Poets 
(1880-94), edited, in five volumes, by Mr. T. Humphrey 
Ward, and English Prose Selections (1893-97), edited, also 
in five volumes, by Sir Henry Craik. We must face the 
fact that the body of English literature is of immense 
extent, and that the general reader has not the time to 
study every department of it. These books offer to him 
selected extracts. If he is born to read, a specimen will 
tempt him on to a whole book, and a book to a whole 
author. Nor is merely partial information, in a reader 
whose professional attention has to be directed else- 
where, worthy of so much scorn as professors are apt 
to give it. Common-sense abhors a system which should 

exclude from the enjoyment of English literature any 

403 



404 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

one who cannot pass an examination on the Treatise of 
the Astrolabe, and it is a pleasure to quote the courageous 
words of Mr. Arthur James Balfour : ^^ So far from a 
little knowledge being undesirable, a little knowledge is 
all that on most subjects any of us can hope to attain ; 
and as a source, not of worldly profit, but of per- 
sonal pleasure, it may be of incalculable value to its 
possessor." 

The author of a general treatise, however, would be 
indeed tame -spirited if he satisfied himself with the 
prospect of such unambitious readers as these, and of 
no others. For those who desire to proceed further 
and deeper, certain guides, especially in the earlier parts 
of the history of modern English literature, must be 
named. Within the last fifteen years an immense pro- 
gress has been made in mediaeval study. In preparing 
for a literary estimate of the later Middle Age in Eng- 
land, no living man has performed so much as Professor 
Skeat, to whom we owe an absolute revision of the texts 
of Chaucer, and of several of his leading poetical con- 
temporaries, based upon scientific principles of philo- 
logy. Mr. Skeat's final edition of Chaucer, in six volumes 
(1896), is invaluable to the student, and supersedes all 
previous work in the same field. In obtaining a correct 
text, the copies of the MSS. published by the Chaucer 
Society have been found serviceable. For thirty years, 
moreover, Mr. Skeat had been giving his attention to 
William Langland, and after having produced, for the 
Early English Text Society, an edition of Pie?^s Plow- 
man, in four volumes (1867-84), he went over the whole 
work again in what is now the standard text, issued at 
Oxford, in two volumes, in 1886. In 1897 he collected 
the principal pieces, in prose and verse, which criticism 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 405 

had gradually rejected from the canon of Chaucer, into 
a single volume. This includes Usk's Testament of Love y 
the Plowman's Tale, and most of the poems formerly- 
attributed to Chaucer, but now proved not to be his. 
The labours of Mr. Skeat are of inestimable value to 
students of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, but they 
must be reminded that he has chosen to leave the purely 
literary aspect almost untouched, and to concentrate 
himself mainly on grammar and philology. 

The publications of the English Text Society include 
Barbour, Wycliffe, and many of the verse-romance 
writers. Blind Harry, Dunbar, the Kingis Quair, 
Rolland, and others have been carefully edited by 
the Scottish Text Society (1883-97). Gower's Confessio 
Amantis has still to be read in Reinhold Pauli's three 
volumes of 1857. Lydgate, although Dr. Schick has 
lately printed and annotated the Temple of Glass, and 
Dr. Koeppel the Story of Thebes, awaits a general editor. 
The minor poems of Occleve (or Hoccleve) were dealt 
with by Dr. Furnivall in 1892. Miss L. Toulmin Smith 
transcribed and edited the York Mystery Plays in 
1885. Mr. I. Gollancz printed the poem called Pearl, 
with a paraphrase, in 1891. The vast researches of the 
late Professor Child of Harvard College resulted in 
his English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-94), by 
far the most important contribution to this difficult 
subject. Mr. ]. ]. Jusserand, in L Epopee Mystique de 
William Langland (1893) and Le Roman d'un Roi 
d Ecosse (1895), has thrown light on the temper of the 
English Middle Ages. Professor McCormick has been 
specially engaged on the text of Troilus and Cressida. 
Wycliffe and his associates have attracted the notice of 
Mr. T. Arnold, who edited the Select English Works in 



406 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

1869-71, and of Mr. Skeat. The Wycliffe Society has 
also done good work. The sixteenth century has not 
of late greatly appealed to English scholars. Hawes 
must still be read in the imperfect edition of the Percy 
Society (1845), Skelton still where Dyce left him in 1843, 
while a critical text and commentary of Surrey is a real 
desideratum. Mr. Arber's useful reprints have placed 
several of the minor writers of the early years of Eliza- 
beth within reach. Before leaving the mediaeval period, 
moreover, the names of Professors Lounsbury and Ten 
Brink must be mentioned. 

From the end of the sixteenth century onwards, almost 
every department of English literature has received the 
attention of students, and there are few authors, even of 
the third or fourth order, who have not found at least 
one recent editor. It would manifestly be impossible to 
give in this place a list of these editions which should 
have any pretence to completeness. The lives of Spenser 
and of Bacon have been treated by Dean Church, that 
of Sidney by Symonds, and that of Shakespeare by a 
hundred writers, among whom Professor Dowden and 
Mr. Sidney Lee (in the Dictionary of National Bio- 
graphy) must be mentioned. Mr. Bullen has edited 
Campion, Marlowe, Middleton, Day, and several of the 
important lyrical collections of the Elizabethan age. 
The labours of Dr. Grosart are too numerous to be 
named in detail. The text of Shakespeare was edited 
by W. G. Clark and Dr. W. Aldis Wright, and has 
recently been revised by the latter ; the editions of Fur- 
ness, Furnivall, and GoUancz have each a peculiarity 
and a merit. Mr. Swinburne has published critical 
volumes on Ben Jonson, on George Chapman, and on 
Shakespeare. The vast compilations of Mr. Fleay deserve 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 407 

respect. The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, which 
occupied Spedding from 1861 to 1874, still retains its 
authority. The most recent texts of Spenser are those of 
Dr. Grosart, and (the Faerie Queen alone) of Mr. T. J. Wise. 
Milton occupied almost simultaneously the attention 
of a great number of adequate biographers and editors. 
Among the former are pre-eminent Masson (1859-80), 
Mark Pattison (1879), Stopford Brooke (1879), and Adolf 
Stern (1877-79). The text of Milton's prose works has 
been neglected, and the edition of Symmons (1806) is 
still the best ; to that of the poems far more attention has 
been given by Prof. Masson, by Prof. Hales, and still more 
recently by Mr. Verity. A valuable contribution to a 
knowledge of the prosody of Milton is the treatise by Mr. 
Robert Bridges (1893). Dry den, whose works, with an 
admirable life, were edited by Sir Walter Scott in 1808, 
was carefully revised by Professor Saintsbury (1882-93), 
who had already published a life of Dryden in 1881. 
The poetical works of Butler were edited, with a new 
biography, by Mr. R. B. Johnson in 1893. The life of 
Locke has been written by Dr. Fowler (1880), and that 
philosopher has found a recent editor in Mr. A. C. Fraser. 
In connection with Bunyan, the excellent work of Mr. J. 
Brown must be recorded. Cowley, Crashaw, Quarles, 
and Henry More have been edited by Dr. Grosart, W^aller 
by Mr. Drury, Donne by Mr. E. K. Chambers, Marvell 
by Mr. Aitken, and Herrick by five or six competing 
scholars. With the exception of Dryden, the Restoration 
dramatists have not as yet received their full meed of 
critical attention, although an Edinburgh reprint gives 
us, among others, Wilson, Davenant, and Crowne ; Mr. 
Ward's Sir John Vanbrugh (1893) is a model for what 
yet remains to be done in this direction. 



4o8 MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE 

With the opening of the eighteenth century, it becomes 
almost impossible to follow the minute progress of biblio- 
graphy. It is desirable, however, to remember that the 
action of a great body of careful revisers is for ever 
modifying both the biography and the text of our prin- 
cipal classics. Professor Courthope has completed the 
editing of Pope, on the basis of materials collected by 
Croker, and partly manipulated by Mr. Elwin. Mr. 
Austin Dobson, besides what he has definitely done for 
Prior, Gay, Goldsmith, and Horace Walpole, has, in 
the general course of his essays, elucidated the minute 
literary history of the eighteenth century in a multitude 
of ways. Steele and Arbuthnot owe much to the in- 
dustry of Mr. Aitken. The great Johnsonian of recent 
years has been Dr. G. Birkbeck Hill. Mr. A. C. Eraser's 
labours on Berkeley, those of Sir Henry Craik on Swift, 
those of Mr. Gladstone on Bishop Butler, and those of 
Mr. Bury on Gibbon, deserve careful attention. This list 
is so imperfect as to offer to numberless students of the 
eighteenth century a positive injustice, for which the 
writer of this little volume apologises on the ground of 
the very limited space at his command. An examina- 
tion, however, of the books thus discursively mentioned 
will suffice to save readers from many of those mistakes 
which are repeated from handbook to handbook by the 
unwary. 



INDEX 



Absalom and Achitophel, 1 88, 189 

Adam Bede, 369 

Addison, Joseph, 197, 211, 212, 2l6- 

220, 222, 223 
Adlington, 75 
Adonais, 312 

A dvancement of Learn ing, 130, 1 3 1 
A las for, 310 
All for Love, 179 
Amelia, 243 

Analogy of Religion, 261 
A^iastatius, 328 
Anato?ny of Melancholy, 133 
Andrew of Wyntoun, 45 
Andrewes, Lancelot, 127 
Antiqtiary, 301 
Apologia, Newman's, 351 
Arbuthnot, John, 225 
Arcadia, 87 

Arden of Feversham, 97 
Areopagitica, 150 

Arnold, Matthew, 214, 367-369, 381 
Arraignment of Paris, 96 
Art of Rhetoric, 64, 65 
Ascham, Roger, 64, 79, 80 
Assembly of Ladies, 44, 45 
Aslrophel and Stella, 87 
Atalanta in Calydon, 3S1 
Austen, Jane, 295-297 

Bacon, Francis, 125, 126, 129-132 

Bage, 294 

Baker, Sir Richard, 149 

Ballads, 40-42, 405 

Barbour, John, 17, 26, 27 

27 409 



Barclay, Alexander, 57 

Barrow, Isaac, 181, 182 

Barry Lyndon, 352 

Beaconsfield, Earl of, 328-330, 333 

Beaumont, Francis, 114-116 

Beaumont, Sir John, 157 

Becket, 362 

Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 332 

Bells and Pomegranates, 335, 365 

Bentley, Richard, 193 

Beppo, 308 

Berkeley, George, 228-229 

Berners, Lord, 61, 62 

Bible, English, 31, 32, (>t^, 127, 128 

Blair, Robert, 237 

Blake, William, 269-275 

Blind Harry, 46 

Bloomfield, 290 

Boccaccio, 15, 16, 17 

Boileau, 172, 180, 1S8, 189, 197, 

205, 206, 207, 209 
Bolingbroke, Viscount, 228 
Book of the Duchess, 14, 15 
Borough, The, 319 
Boswell, James, 252, 253 
Bos worth Field, 157 
Bowles, William Lisle, 275, 276 
Boyle, Charles, 193 
Bronte, Charlotte, 354, 355 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 148, 153 
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 331, 

335. 338. 339 
Browning, Robert, 332, 335, 339, 

340, 363-367, 381 
Bruce, The, 26, 27 



4IO 



INDEX 



Brunton, Mary, 327 
Bunyan, John, 186, 187 
Burke, Edmund, 290 
Burney, Frances, 294, 295 
Burns, Robert, 269-275 
Burton, Robert, 133, 153 
Butler, Joseph, 261 
Butler, Samuel, 188 
Byron, Lord, 305-310, 328 

Campbell, Thomas, 287, 288 

Campion, Thomas, 8S, 91 

Candidate, 269 

Canterbury Tales, 18-22 

Capgrave, John, 43 

Carew, Thomas, 146 

Carlyle, Thomas, 320, 321, 332, 333, 

344-347, 349 
Cartwright, William, 137, 141 
Castle of Otranto, 293 
Castle Rackrent, 295 
Cato, 211 

Cavendish, George, 64 
Caxton, William, 47, 52, 53 
Cenci, The, 311 
Centlivre, Susannah, 192 
Chapman, George, 117 
Charles CMalley, 343 
Chatterton, Thomas, 230 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 8, 9, 12-24, 65, 

78, 404 
Chazicer s Dream, 37 
Childe Harold, 307 
Chillingworth, William, 135, 136 
Chris label, 278 
Churchill, Charles, 239 
Clanvowe, Sir Thomas, 37 
Clarendon, Earl of, 149, 150, 15 1 
Clarke, Samuel, 197, 203 
Cleveland, Sir John, 188 
Coleridge, Hartley, 332 
Coleridge, S. T., 109, no, 123, 276- 

283, 320 
Collier, Jeremy, 192 
Collins, Anthony, 255 



Collins, William, 238, 268 

Comical Revenge, 178 

Complete Angler, 152 

Comus, 145, 149 

Confessio Amantis, 25-26, 405 

Confessions of an Opium- Eater, 320, 

322 
Congreve, William, 191, 213 
Conquest of Granada, 178 
Constable, Henry, 88 
Constitutional History of England^ 

325. 326 
Contarini Fletning, 330 
Cooper' s Hill, 158, 187 
Corneille, Pierre, 137, 140, 141, 176, 

177, 191 
Court of Love, 65, ^d 
Cowley, Abraham, 158, 169-173 
Cowper, William, 269-275 
Crabbe, George, 269-275, 280, 319 
Cr an ford, 355 

Cranmer, Thomas, 63, 64, 79, 127 
Crashaw, Richard, 156 * 
Cuckoo and the Nightingale, The 

37 

Cziriosities of Literature, 299 
Cypress Grove, A, 133 

Daniel, Samuel, 95, 119, 120 

Daniel Deronda, 370 

Darwin, Charles, 358, 359, 377 

Darwin, Erasmus, 275 

Davenant, Sir William, 158, 162, 

170, 175, 176 
Davys, Sir John, 120 
Decline and Fall of the Roman Em - 

pire, 258-259 
Defoe, Daniel, 226, 227 
Deguileville, G. de, 11, 13, 14 
Dekker, Thomas, 1 1 7, 135 
Denham, Sir John, 158, 170 
Dennis, John, 199, 200 
De Quincey, Thomas, 134, 320, 322, 

323 
Descent of Man, 359 



INDEX 



411 



Desportes, Philippe, 90 

Dickens, Charles, 341-343 

Dispensary, The, 197 

D'Israeli, Isaac, 299 

Don Juan, 308, 309 

Donne, John, 92, 122, 123, 135, 142 

Douglas, Gavin, 58-60 

Dramatis Persons, 366 

Drayton, Michael, 121 

Drummond, William, 133 

Dryden, John, 19, 108, 113, 136, 
158, 166, 172, 174-180, 187, 188- 
190, 194, 207, 213, 270, 291 

Duchess of Malfy, 118 

Dunbar, William, 48-51, 55 

Early Italian Poets, Rossetti's, 381 
Ecclesiastical Polity, 1 24- 1 2 7 
Edgeworth, Maria, 295 
Edinburgh Revieiv, 297, 298, 320, 

332, 349 
Edward II., 99 
Eikonoklastes, 162 
Elia, 320, 322 
Eliot, George, 369, 370 
Eloisa to Abelard, 21 1 
Epipsychidion, 313 
Esmond, 353 

Essay of Dra?)iatic Poesy, 177 
Essays, Bacon's, 125, 126, 130 
Essays in Criticism, 367 
Ether edge. Sir George, 178, 191 
Euphues, 80, 81, 127 
Evelyn, John, 180 
Every Man in his Humour, in 
Examens, of Corneille, 1 79 
Excursion, 276, 285 

Fabian, Robert, 60, 61 
Faerie Queen, 83-86 
Falls of Princes, 36 
Farmer'' s Boy, 2S9 
Fatistus, Dr., 95> 99 
Felix Holt, 370 
Feltham, Owen, 134 



Ferrier, Miss, 327 

Fielding, Henry, 243, 244, 352, 

353 

Fitz-Gerald, Edward, 380 

Fletcher, Giles, 121, 122, 142 

Fletcher, John, 104, 114-116, 175 

Flower and the leaf The, 44, 45 

Ford, John, 135, 137, 140 

Fortescue, Sir John, 52 

Fox, The, 112 

Foxe, 64, 80 

Frankejistein, 327 

Freeman, Edward Augustus, 375, 

376 
French Revolution, 344, 346 
Friedrich 11.^ 347 
Froissart, 61 

Froude, James Anthony, 373, 374 
Fudge Family in Paris, 318 
Fuller, Thomas, 152, 153 

Galt, John, 328 

Ga77imer Gurton^s Needle, 94 

Garth, Samuel, 197 

Gascoigne, George, 94 

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 355, 

356 
Gebir, 324 

Gertrude of Wyoming, 288 
Geste of Robin Hood, dp-zifi 
Giaour, The, '^oy 
Gibbon, Edward, 258-260 
Gifford, William, 298 
Gilpin, William, 263 
Goblin Market, 381 
Godwin, William, 293 
Goethe, Wolfgang von, 240, 288 
Golding, Arthur, 76 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 239, 247, 253, 

254 
Googe, Barnabee, 76 
Gorbuduc, T], 93, 94 
Governail of Princes, 35 
Gower, John, 16, 24-26 
Graham, 289 



412 



INDEX 



Grammar of Assent, ^,351 

Gray, Thomas, 234, 236, 238, 262, 

268 
Green, John Richard, 376 
Greene, Robert, 89, 97, 98, 126 
Griffith Gatmt, 371 
Grimald, Nicholas, 67-71 
Giyll Grange, 331 
Gtty Mannering, 301 

Habington, William, 146, 147 
Hajji Baba, 328 
Halifax, Marquis of, 183, 184 
Hall, Edward, 60, 61 
Hall, Joseph, 134 
Hallam, Henry, 325 
Hamlet, 103, 109 
Hawes, Stephen, 56, 57 
Hazlitt, William, 109, 320 
Headlong Ball, 331 
Henrietta Temple, 333 
Henryson, Robert, 46-48 
Herbert, George, 135, 147 
Hereford, Nicholas of, 31 
Hero and Lea7ider, 99 
Ilerrick, Robert, 155, 156 
Ileywood, John, 93 
Heywood, Thomas, 118 
Hobbes, Thomas, 148, 149, 154 
Hoccleve, see Occleve 
Holingshed, Raphael, 80 
Hood, Thomas, 332 
Hooker, Richard, 124-127 
Hope, James J., 328 
HorcE Paiilince, 261 
Home, Richard Hengist, 337 
Howell, James, 148, 152 
Huchown, 26 
Hiidibras, 188 
Hume, David, 256, 257 
Humphrey Clinker, 246 
Hunt, Leigh, 314, 315, 320 
Huon de Bordeaux, 61, 62 
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 378 
Hype7'ion, 315 



Idylls of the King, 362 
Imaginary Conversations, 324, 325 
Indian E7nperor, The, 179 
In Alemoriam, 361 
Interhides, Heywood's, 93 
Italy, 319 
Ivanhoe, 300 

Jacqueline, 319 

James I. of Scotland, 38-40 

James, G. P. R., 333 

Jane Eyre, 354 

Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 297 

Jew of Malta, 99 

Johnson, Samuel, 247, 249-253, 267, 

384 
Jonson, Ben, 111-114, 129, 136-138, 

141, 177 
Joseph Andrews, 243 
Journal to Stella, 223 
Julian and Maddalo, 3 1 1 

Keats, John, 315-317, 33^, 337 

Kennedy, Walter, 48, 49 

King David and Fair Bethsabe, 97 

King's Quair, 38-40 

Kingsley, Charles, 371, 372 

Kubla Khan, 283 

Kyd, Thomas, 97 

Lady of the Lake, The, 289 

Lalla Rookh, 318 

Lamb, Charles, 314, 320, 321 

Lancelot of the Lake, 26 

Landor, Walter Savage, no, 324, 

325 
Langland, William, 7-1 1, 404 
Laon and Cythna, 311 
Lara, 319 
Law, William, 229 
Lay of the Last Minstrel^ 289 
Lear, King, 104 
Legend of Good Women, 18 
Lenore, of BUrger, 284, 288 
Lestrange, Sir Roger, 179 



INDEX 



413 



Letter to a Noble Lord, 291 

Lever, Charles, 343 

Life of Schiller, -^2.1, 332 

Lingard, John, 325 

Lives of the English Poets, 251, 

267 
Locke, John, 136, 154, 184, 185 
Lockhart, John Gibson, 327 
Lodge, Thomas, 89, 91, 126 
London, 320 

Lord of the Lsles, The, 289 
Lower, Sir William, 177 
Lycidas, 145 

Lydgate, John, 33-37, 66, 405 
Lyly, John, 80-82, 88, 96 
Lyndesay, Sir David, 60 
Lyrical Ballads, 277 
Lytton, first Lord, 309, 328, 329, 

333 

Macaulay, Thomas B., Lord, 332, 

347-350 
Macbeth, 104, 105 
Machault, 13, 15, 18 
Mackintosh, Sir James, 325 
Malory, Sir Thomas, 53-55 
Man of Mode, 191 
Mandeville, Bernard de, 224, 225, 

226 
Marino, 145 
Marivaux, 219, 240 
Marlowe, Christopher, 97-100 
Mai-juion, 289 
Marriage, 327 

Marryat, Frederick, 333, 343 
Marston, John, 117 
Marvell, Andrew, 188 
Mason, William, 252, 253 
Massinger, Philip, 138 
Maud, 361, 379 
Men ana Women, 339,^365 
Mennis, Sir John, 188 
Middleton, Thomas, 1 18 
Midstimmer Nighfs Dream, 103 
Mill, John Stuart, 358 



Milton, John, 142-145, 148, 149, 

150, 161-169 
Mirror for Magistrates, 77 
Mitford, William, 325 
Modern painters, 356 
Moore, Thomas, 317, 318 
More, Sir Thomas, 62 
Morris, William, 380-382 
Morte d' Arthur, 53-55 
Mr. Midship7nan Easy, 343 

Napier, Sir William, 325 
Nash, Thomas, 99, 126 
Nemesis of Faith, 373 
Newman, John Henry, 350-352 
Nicholas Nickleby, 341 
Night Thoughts, 237 
Nightmare Abbey, 331 
Noctes Ambrosian(E, 2)'2.'2. 
Norman Conqiiest, 375 
North, Sir Thomas, 65 

OCCLEVE, Thomas, 33-35 , 405 
Ode on Christ's Nativity, 143 
Oldham, John, 188 
Oliver Twist, 341 
On a Regicide Peace, 292 
Origin of Species, 359 
Ossian, 239, 240, 268, 269 
Otway, Thomas, 178, 195 
Overbury, Sir Thomas, 134 

Paine, Tom, 293 

Paley, 261 

Pamela, 243 

Paracelsus, 339 

Paradise Lost, 1 63- 1 69 

Paradise Regained, 163 

Parnell, Thomas, 211 

Past and Picture, 344 

Pastime of Pleasure, 56, 57 

Paston Letters, 43 

Pater, Walter Horatio, 383 

Pauline, 335 

Peacock, Thomas Love, 330, 33 1 



414 



INDEX 



Pearl, 5, 6, 405 

Pecock, Reginald, 42, 43 

Peele, George, 96, 97 

Pelham, 329 

Pepys, Samuel, 186, 195 

Percy's Reliqties, 239, 268 

Peter Simple, 343 

Peveril of the Peak, 300 

Phaer, 76 

Pickwick Papers, 341 

Piers the Plowman^ s Creed, 28 

Pilgrim s Progress, 186 

/'/^/^ /'ajj^j-, 339, 365 

Plain Dealer, 191 

Pleastires of Hope, 287 

Pleasttrcs of Memory, 276 

Political Justice, 293 

Poly-Olbion, 121 

Pope, Alexander, 205-215, 408 

Porter, Jane, 299 

Praed, W, M., 332 

Prelude, The, 285 

Price, Richard, 292 

Price, Sir Uvedale, 263 

Pride and Prejudice, 2^6 

Priestley, Joseph, 292 

Princess, The, 361 

Principles of Psychology, 377 

Prior, Matthew, 209 

Promethens Unbound, 311 

Purvey, John, 31, 127 

Quarterly Review, 298, 303 
Queen Mary, 262 
Queen Mother and Rosamond, 381 
Queenhoo Hall, 299 

Radcliffe, Mrs, 293 
Kaleigh, Sir Walter, ?,t„ 126 
Ralph Roister Doister, 93, 94 
Randolph, Thomas, 148 
Rape of the Lock, 207, 209 
Rapin, Rene, 199, 200, 205 
Rasselas, 247, 251 
Reade, Charles, 371 



Rehearsal, 179 

Religion of Protestants, 135 

Remorse, 286 

Repressor of overmuch Blamijtg, 42 

Revolt of the I'artars, 323 

Reynolds, John Hamilton, 315 

Richardson, Samuel, 241, 242 

Rights of Man, 293 

Ring and the Book, The, 340, 366 

Rivers, Earl, 52, 53 

Rob Roy, 300 

Robertson, William, 257, 258 

Robin Hood Ballads, 40-42 

Robinson Crtisoe, 227 

Roderick Rajidom, 246 

Rogers, Samuel, 276, 319 

Rolland, 67 

Roman de la Rose, 5, 13 

Rosamund Gray, 321 

Rossetti, Christina, 380-382 

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 380-382 

Rousseau, J. J., 227, 235, 248, 293 

Rowley, William, 118 

Rtibaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 380 

Ruskin, Mr. John, 356-358 

Russell, Thomas, 275 

Rust, George, 151 

Rutebeuf, ii 

Rutter, Joseph, 176 

Sabbath, The, 289 

Sackville, Thomas, 77, "^^ 

Samson Agonistes, 163, 164 

Sandys, George, 157 

Sartor Resartus, 333, 344, 345 

Scott, Sir Walter, 288, 289, 299-302, 

303, 307, 327 
Seasons, The, 233-236 
Seneca, 76, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97 
Serinons at St, Mary^s, 350 
Seven Lamps of Architecttire, 356 
Shaftesbury, third Earl, 197, 202, 

203-205 
Shakespeare, William, 91, 92, 95, 

loo-iio, 112, 141, 177 



INDEX 



415 



Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 163, 310-314, 

336 
Shepherd' s Calender^ 82, 83 
Ship of Fools, 57 
Shirley, James, 138, 140, 190 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 86, 87, 88, 92 
Silas Marner, 369 
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 

5,6 
Skelton, John, 57, 58 
Smith, Sydney, 297 
Smollett, Tobias, 245-247, 343 
Songs of Innocence, 269 
Sonnets, Shakespeare's, 92, 103 
Sordello, 339, 365 

Southey, Robert, 286, 287, 303, 325 
Spanish Tragedy, 297 
Specimens of the Dramatic Poets, 314, 

321 
Spectator, 218, 219 
Spencer, Mr. Herbert, 377 
Spenser, Edmund, 82-86, 92, 314 
Stanley, Arthur Penryn, 372, 373 
Stanyhurst, 76 
Steele, Richard, 216-218 
Sterne, Laurence, 244, 245 
Still, John, 94 
Stones of Venice, 356 
Strafford, 365 
Strode, Ralph, 5 
Surrey, Earl of, 67-72 
Swift, Jonathan, 193, 210, 220-225, 

255 
Swinburne, Mr. A. C, 314, 380-382 

Table Talk, 269 

Tale of a Tub, 221, 222 

Tales from Shakespeare, 321 

Tamburlaine, 99 

Task, The, 269 

Taller, 215-218 

Taylor, Jeremy, 151, 152 

lemple, Sir William, 183, 193 

Temple, The, 147 

Te??iple of Class, 36 



Tennyson, first Lord, 319, 331, 335- 

337, 360-365, 381, 384 
Testamejit of Cressid, 47 
Testament of Love, 30, 405 
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 

352 
Thaddeus of Warsaw, 299 
Theophrastus, 134, 136, 218 
Thierry, Augustin, 349 
Thistle and the Rose, The, 49 
Thomson, James, 233-236, 268 
Tickell, Thomas, 212 
Tillotson, John, 136, 181, 203 
Tom Jones, 243, 301 
TottePs Miscellany, 67-70, 74 
Tourneur, Cyril, 119 
Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 30, 

31 
Tristram Shandy, 244 
Troihts and Cressida, 16, 17, 21, 405 
Trollope, Anthony, 371 
Turbervile, George, 76 
Turner, Sharon, 325 
Two Gentlemen of Verotia, 99 
Tyndale, William, 63 
Tyndall, John, 378 

Udall, Nicholas, 94 
Underdowne, 75 
Usk, Thomas, 29, 30, 405 
Utopia, 62 

Valerius, 327 
Vanbrugh, Sir John, 192 
Vanity Fair, 352, 353 
Vaughan, Henry, 156 
Venetia, 330 
Venice Preserved, 195 
Venus and Adonis, loi, 103 
Vicar of Wakefield, 247, 254 
Viezv of the Middle Ages, 325 
Villette, 354 

Vision of Judgment, 308 
I'ision of Piers Plowman, 7- 1 2 
Vivian Grey, 329 



4i6 



INDEX 



Waller, Edmund, 157, 158 
Walpole, Horace, 262, 293 
Walsh, William, 207 
Walton, Izaak, 148, 149, 152 
Warton, Thomas, 239, 252, 268 
Watson, Thomas, 91, 92 
Waverley, 289, 299 
Webster, John, 118, 1 19 
Wells, Charles, 315 
Westward Ho, 372 

Whiggisni in its Relations to Litera- 
ture, 323 
White, Gilbert, 263 
White, Henry Kirke, 337 
White Devil, 119 
Williajjz of Falerme , 3 



Wilson, John, 176 
Wilson, Thomas, 64, 65 
Wives and Daughters, 355 
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 276, 277 
Wordsworth, William, 150, 214, 276- 

283, 289, 303 
Wuthering Heights, 355 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 67-72 
Wycherley, William, 191 
Wycliffe, John, 31, 32, 127, 406 

York Plays, 29, 405 
Young, Edward, 236, 237 

Zanoni, 329, 343 



THE END 



A SHORT HISTORY OF 

MODERN ENGLISH 
LITERATURE 



BY 

EDMUND GOSSE 

HON. M. A. OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 




NEW YORK 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1897 




LbAp':0 



